The Mimic Men

1

ON Isabella when I was a child it was a disgrace to be poor. It is, alas, no longer so. And it astonished me when I first came to England to find that it wasn’t so here either. I arrived at a time of reform. Politicians proclaimed the meanness of their birth and the poverty of their upbringing and described themselves with virtuous rage as barefoot boys. On Isabella, where we had the genuine article in abundance, this was a common term of schoolboy abuse; and I was embarrassed on behalf of these great men. To be descended from generations of idlers and failures, an unbroken line of the unimaginative, unenterprising and oppressed, had always seemed to me to be a cause for deep, silent shame. Sandra’s attitude, of contempt for her origins, seemed to me healthier and more liberal, being more quickening of endeavour; though it puzzled me that she too made no attempt to hide her origins.

It was my ambiguous New World background, no doubt. My father was a schoolteacher and poor. I never saw his family and naturally suspected the worst; and though it was through my father that I was later to be dragged into public life, as a boy I did what I could to suppress the connection. I preferred to lay claim to my mother’s family. They were among the richest in the island and belonged to that small group known as ‘Isabella millionaires’. It gave me great pleasure at school to have Cecil, my mother’s brother, roughly my own age, say that we were related. Cecil was a tyrant; he offered and withdrew his patronage whimsically. But I never wavered in my claim.

My mother’s family owned the Bella Bella Bottling Works and were among other things the local bottlers of Coca-Cola. In Coca-Cola therefore I at an early age took an almost proprietorial interest. I welcomed gibes at its expense and liked to pretend they were aimed at me personally, though I could not find it in myself to go as far as Cecil, who offered to fight any boy who spoke disrespectfully of his family’s product. Though he perhaps never knew the word, my mother’s father managed his public relations with skill; there was no one on Isabella, I am sure, who did not know of Bella Bella. We — or they — sponsored two programmes on the local radio station: one, Songs of Yesteryear, a request programme, rather dreary, for Bella Bella in general; the other, extremely popular, for Coca-Cola, The Coca-Cola Quiz, which offered prizes. Tickets for this ‘show’ were allotted to schools throughout the island; there was always a rush for them. Two or three afternoons a week groups of schoolchildren were taken round the Bella Bella works. My grandfather had put it to the education authorities that such tours of modern industrial plant were educational; and in spite of the passionate but unimportant opposition of my father the authorities agreed. The visits took place during school hours; at the end each child was given a free drink; and again, as for The Coca-Cola Quiz, numbers had to be fiercely controlled.

I liked going with these groups to the bottling works, though it was a torment to me then to be anonymous. I longed to receive some sign of overlordship or even recognition from the employees, and had fantasies in which, during an emergency, I demonstrated my familiarity with the complex machinery of the great enterprise. It was easy enough for Cecil. He never stayed with the group but prowled around everywhere, Mister Cecil to everybody. He made stern comments about the clarity or consistency of the syrup — about which the Coca-Cola people were strict — and generally tried to hint that he had come not as a student but as a spy. This was what we sometimes did in the city together, frightening a shopkeeper who had at first taken us for simple schoolboys. Sometimes I tried to be a spy on my own. I was not always successful.

Cecil was so awed by the wealth and importance of his family that anyone might have believed money had come to the family when Cecil was of an age to understand. This wasn’t so. But perhaps Cecil remembered, as I remembered, the older house of his family. There was a large covered area at the back of this house, and for a long time I saw there a rusting metal pole of sorts, which was said to have been the first piece of Bella Bella bottling equipment. I believe it had been used for capping bottles manually, one at a time. I also remembered a long wooden gallery in this house. It was divided into dark cubicles and it was possible to find on shelves in these cubicles bottles of coloured concentrates and little packets of powders, imported from England. The labels were oddly scientific and medical in appearance, black and white with fine printing, a contrast with the bright colours and the drawings of fruit on the labels of the drinks these concentrates went to make.

In the new house, of course, there was no sign of home manufacture. I believe Cecil regretted this. He was Bella Bella and Coca-Cola. He didn’t like anyone to forget it and he didn’t like to forget it himself. He had all the facts and figures about Coca-Cola sales, being admitted even when very young to the family’s business secrets; and he was full of stories about Coca-Cola. It was Cecil who told me either that Coca-Cola was an aphrodisiac or that it was regarded as such in certain Eastern countries. And I believe it was Cecil who told me that, to prevent the Coca-Cola secret formula from perishing for all time in a single ghastly accident, the American directors never travelled together, even in an elevator; though this might be a later story, from a different person, about another company. Of Cecil himself it was told that once, going by launch to a children’s picnic on one of the islets near Isabella, he became so enraged by the sight of cases of Pepsi-Cola, destined for this very picnic, that he threw them all overboard before anyone realized what he was up to; and sought to justify his behaviour to his bemused hosts and their outraged guests by a prolonged show of temper at what he claimed was their discourtesy to his family. I heard the story many times; it acquired the nature of legend. Cecil himself told it often when he was a young man and already, sadly, looking back to his childhood as to his great days. As a child Cecil was licensed to a degree. He liked to think of himself as eccentric and violent, and in this he was encouraged by his family, who relished the resulting stories. He was naturally aggressive; I feel the passion for real-life story-making permanently unsettled him. He was the only person I knew who even as a child tried to be a ‘character’.

My father hated Cecil. It was a lukewarm response to Cecil’s contempt; Cecil had no respect for age. My father often said, ‘That little brute is going to end up swinging on the gallows, you mark my words.’ Hating Cecil, he hated Coca-Cola, and made a vow, which I believe he kept, never to touch it. I reported the vow and the abstention to Cecil, who said, ‘It’s a young man’s drink.’ I reported this back to my father, who raged. But each was piqued by the other’s contempt; each wished to put down the other; and between the middle-aged man and the young boy I acted as go-between.

‘Nana,’ I said one day, referring in this way to Cecil’s father, ‘Nana went to America to buy a pipe.’

‘Do you really believe that? He probably bought a pipe when he was in America. He didn’t go to America to buy a pipe.’

‘It was what Cecil said.’

‘If you believe that you are a bigger damn fool than that damn big fool.’

On another day, when my father heard that I was going on a tour of the Bella Bella works, he went to the mousetrap and brought out a dead mouse and with a worrying smile whispered into my ear, ‘I bet you six cents, a shilling, you wouldn’t drop this in the vat or whatever it is they use. I bet you you wouldn’t.’

Part of the trouble was that my mother’s family had made their money five or six years too late. When my father married my mother the condescension had all been his. He was over thirty, had already made some mark in missionary circles, and was considered a rising man in the Education Department. The proof of this early glory was to be found in my father’s bookcase, in a slender old-fashioned volume called The Missionary Martyr of Isabella. It was one of a series of Missionary Martyrs: the decorated endpapers listed them all, some from places, like Thebaw, of which I had never heard. The martyrdom referred to in the Isabella book was not especially bloody: the missionary had died at an advanced age in bed, in his own country, but of malaria contracted in the tropics. The book was made up of extracts from the missionary’s diary, his wife’s diary, letters, sermons; and ended with the text of the oration over his grave. There were also many photographs which contrived to make Isabella look exceedingly wild. One of the photographs was of my father as a young man, almost a boy, standing in a group in front of a thatched wooden hut; the background was simple bush. The reproduction was poor, light and shadow ill-defined; and in the badly-fitting old-fashioned costume, which appeared to force his neck and chin out and up, my father looked faintly aboriginal and lost, at the end of the world, in a clearing in the forest. The impression was not altogether belied by the text, for in the diaries and letters of the missionary and his lady was a startling vision of the world. The centre of this world was their missionary activity; everything led outwards from this and led back to this. Isabella became an almost Biblical land, full of symbols and portents and marks of God’s glory, a land of stoic journeys through scoffing crowds, encounters with khaki-clad officials hostile to the work, and disputations with devious Brahmins in oriental robes seeking to undermine the work. It was not an island I recognized. Nor could I recognize my father from the descriptions in the diary of the missionary’s lady. It was she who had discovered my father. It was she who saw that, young as he was, he had the marks of grace. I read, incredulously, of the young boy, my father, ‘proclaiming the terrors of the law’ and urging ‘jeering crowds’ to ‘receive the Gospel of grace’. Again and again he came to the rescue of his patroness when she was ‘struggling unequally with a wily disputant’. ‘Let me speak,’ he said simply. Then she stood behind him; and ‘like a war-steed rejoicing in the din of battle he charged in where danger was greatest, and the antagonist was silenced’. One Sunday she was waiting for him at the mission house. He was late; she was getting impatient. Then she saw him in the distance cycling along the bumpy dirt road, and all thoughts of reproach went out of her head. She guessed he had had a puncture; she saw him ‘riding on his bicycle, as on an ass, to his Sabbath work’. He came slowly up, and then was cycling beside the tall hibiscus hedge of the grounds. All of him was hidden except for his white turban, which the sun caught and turned to dazzle; and she thought then she saw an angel flying in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting Gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth. I found this entry in the lady’s diary inexplicably moving. Always at this stage in the book I felt the need for a climax. But after this, in The Missionary Martyr of Isabella, there was no more of my father. The missionary’s lady, much younger than her husband and, from both their accounts, very frail, fell ill and was sent to her home; and after some years of solitary labour the missionary himself followed her. So that it had all led to nothing, so far as my father was concerned. When I read this book I used to get the feeling that my father was a man who had been cut off from his real country, which in my imagination was as glorious as the Isabella described in the diary of the missionary’s lady: nowhere else would people see magic in a white turban, a hibiscus hedge, a bicycle and the Sunday-morning sun. I used to get the feeling that my father had in some storybook way been shipwrecked on the island and that over the years the hope of rescue had altogether faded. The book, of magic, was in his bookcase; but he never spoke of it; I never saw him reading it. Perhaps he too felt that it described another man.

‘Your mother and her family can get on their high horse,’ he used to say, when the talk turned to Coca-Cola or when I came back from a week-end with Cecil, ‘but I remember the time when your mother’s mother used to sell milk to my mother. Selling and carrying the cow. Milking the milk out — in a pan, in a bottle, in a bucket — and selling it on the spot, just like that, in the road. Carrying the cow with a rope. And I remember the time when your mother’s father, never mind the Legco and the Exco’ — my mother’s father was a nominated member of both the Legislative Council and the Executive Council — ‘I remember the time when your mother’s father used to full his bottles with a funnel.’

This was far from lessening my admiration for them. In my imagination I saw my mother’s mother leading her cow through a scene of pure pastoral: calendar pictures of English gardens superimposed on our Isabellan villages of mud and grass: village lanes on cool mornings, the ditches green and grassy, the water crystal, the front gardens of thatched huts bright with delicate flowers of every hue. She was as brightly coloured a storybook figure as her husband. I imagined him sitting at a wooden table and by the light of an oil lamp scrupulously ‘fulling’ his bottles with a funnel, bringing to that labour a self-contained, almost religious, stillness, his inward eye fixed on a goal which transcended the frivolity of his present pursuit, the concoction of soft drinks, whose quality and measure yet remained of surpassing importance. The goal, when realized, would astonish the scoffing world. It would not astonish him. Nor would it astonish his wife who, as devoutly as himself, looked far beyond the flowery lanes through which, penitentially every morning, she led her milk-giving cow.

It was, as might be imagined, a slow humiliation for my father to find that he, who had married the shopkeeper’s daughter, was forced over the years into the position of the underpaid schoolteacher with whom the family of the rich industrialist had imprudently formed a marriage alliance. And it didn’t help that my mother’s behaviour was that of someone who quietly accepted her own guilt. My mother had received little English education and so was separated as by a generation from her brother and sisters who came later, at the period of wealth. One result was that she exaggerated her age. She liked to think that she was old-fashioned and had more in common with her parents than with her sisters and brother. In this way she tried to resolve a difficult situation. I think she succeeded. Her old-fashioned upbringing, which prescribed acceptance without complaint, was a help to her. She accepted my father’s abuse; she accepted her family’s tacit — in Cecil, open — disapproval of my father. By a display of perpetual guilt she continued to show loyalty to both sides, even after my father had stopped going to her parents’ house.

At an early age, then, I was made aware of the oddity of the arrangement whereby two human beings, who were in no way related, paired off. I suppose it is in this that I must look for an explanation of the scene which took place while I was still in a very junior class at school. We were, I remember, doing masculines and feminines from Nesfield’s Grammar. The master asked the masculines, the boys provided the feminines. Abbott, abbess; stag, roe; hart, hind; fox, vixen.

‘Husband?’

It was my turn. I was mortified.

‘Husband, boy.’

An answer was needed, and I knew. I got out of my desk and walked down the aisle to Mr Shepherd’s table. He looked puzzled. I went and stood in front of him. He bent down with concern and I whispered into his ear: ‘Wife.’

More than thirty years later, the man agrees with the child: it is a terrible word.

For Cecil childhood was the great time; he would never cease to regret its passing away. It was different with me. I could scarcely wait for my childhood to be over and done with. I have no especial hardship or deprivation to record. But childhood was for me a period of incompetence, bewilderment, solitude and shameful fantasies. It was a period of burdensome secrets — like the word ‘wife’, a discovery about the world which I was embarrassed to pass on to the world — and I longed for nothing so much as to walk in the clear air of adulthood and responsibility, where everything was comprehensible and I myself was as open as a book. I hated my secrets. A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur. Even this is quite sufficiently painful.

My first memory of school is of taking an apple to the teacher. This puzzles me. We had no apples on Isabella. It must have been an orange; yet my memory insists on the apple. The editing is clearly at fault, but the edited version is all I have. This version contains a few lessons. One is about the coronation of the English king and the weight of his crown, so heavy he can wear it only a few seconds. I would like to know more; but the film jumps to another classroom and the terrors of arithmetic. Then, in this version, as in a dream where we wake before we fall — but not always: recently, doubtless as a result of the effort of memory and this very writing, I dreamt that in this city I was being carried helplessly down a swiftly flowing river, the Thames, that sloped, and could only break my fall by guiding my feet to the concrete pillars of the bridge that suddenly spanned the river, and in my dream I felt the impact and knew that I had broken my legs and lost their use forever — but as in a dream, I say, the terrors of arithmetic disappear. And I am in a new school. Cecil is also there. The first morning, the parade in the quadrangle. ‘Right tweel, left tweel. Boys in the quadrangle, right tweel. Boys on the platform, left tweel, right tweel, left tweel. To the hall, march! Right and left tweel.’ I tweel and tweel. I write what I hear: a tweel to me a very dashing and pointless school twirl. But school is such pointlessness. ‘Today,’ the teacher says, ‘while I full up this roll book, I want you boys to sit down quiet and write a letter to a prospective employer asking for a job after you leave school.’ He gives us details of the job and on the blackboard writes out the opening sentence and one or two others for us to copy. I know I am too young for employment, and I am bewildered. But no other boy is. I write: ‘Dear Sir, I humbly beg to apply for the vacant post of shipping clerk as advertised in this morning’s edition of the Isabella Inquirer. I am in the fourth standard of the Isabella Boys School and I study English, Arithmetic, Reading, Spelling and Geography. I trust that my qualifications will be found suitable. School overs at three and I have to be home by half past four. I think I can get to work at half past three but I will have to leave at four. I am nine years and seven months old. Trusting this application will receive your favourable attention, and assuring you at all times of my devoted service, I remain, my dear Sir, your very humble and obedient servant, R. R. K. Singh.’ The letter is read out to the class by the teacher, who has fulled up his roll book. The class dissolves in laughter. It is an absurd letter. I know; but I was asked for it. Then the letters of other boys like Browne and Deschampsneufs are read out, and I see. Absolute models. But how did they know? Who informs them about the ways of the world and school?

Of Deschampsneufs, in fact, I already knew a little. Soon I was to know more. His distinction was vague but acknowledged by all. The teachers handled him with care. Uniformed servants, one male, one female, brought his lunch to school in a basket and spread it on a white tablecloth on his desk. He had taken me once to his house to see the grape-vine that grew on a trellis in his drive. He told me it was the only grape-vine that grew on the island and was very special and historical. He had also shown me his Meccano set. Grape-vine and Meccano sets were accordingly things which I at once put beyond ambition, just as, until that moment, they had been outside knowledge; they were things that befell a boy like Deschampsneufs. It was also part of his developed ability to manage the world that he had views on the reigning king, preferring the last, whose portrait hung in our school hall; it was a judgement that coloured my view of both kings for years.

Browne of course had no Meccano set and no grape-vine. But Browne too knew his way about the world; his speech to me was the very distillation of the wisdom of a hundred Negro backyards. Browne knew about the police and I believe even had connections with those black men. Browne knew about the current toughs and passed on gossip about sportsmen. Browne was also famous. He knew many funny songs and whenever a song was required at school he was asked to sing. At our concerts he wore a straw hat and a proper suit with a bowtie; people applauded as soon as he came on. His biggest hit was a song called ‘Oh, I’m a happy little nigger’; his miming during this song was so good that people jerked forward on their seats with laughter and often you couldn’t hear the words. I deeply envied Browne his fame and regard. For him the world was already charted.

So it was too for the young in my own family. Cecil had not only lived for a hundred years but had a fantastic memory. He constantly referred to his past and already had the gift of seeing a pattern in events. And there was Cecil’s elder sister Sally. She was the most beautiful person in the world. I was in love with her but I felt I made no impact on her. She had a little court made up of young girls from other families; with her these girls were very grave and adult. Sally read American magazines for the fashions, which she discussed with these girls. They also discussed films in a way that was new to me. They were less interested in the stories than in the actors, about whom each girl appeared to possess an exclusive, ennobling knowledge. This knowledge disheartened me. Sally was especially interested in actors’ noses. This interest had never been mine, had never occurred to me. Was it Peter Lawford’s nose she approved of then? No; that came years later. This interest in noses referred us, her hearers, back to her own nose, which was classical Indo-Aryan, the nostrils, as Sally herself told us, being exactly the shape of a pea. How could I get anywhere with a girl like Sally?

My reaction to my incompetence and inadequacy had been not to simplify but to complicate. For instance, I gave myself a new name. We were Singhs. My father’s father’s name was Kripal. My father, for purposes of official identification, necessary in that new world he adorned with his aboriginal costume, ran these names together to give himself the surname of Kripalsingh. My own name was Ranjit; and my birth certificate said I was Ranjit Kripalsingh. That gave me two names. But Deschampsneufs had five apart from his last name, all French, all short, all ordinary, but this conglomeration of the ordinary wonderfully suggested the extraordinary. I thought to compete. I broke Kripalsingh into two, correctly reviving an ancient fracture, as I felt; gave myself the further name of Ralph; and signed myself R. R. K. Singh. At school I was known as Ralph Singh. The name Ralph I chose for the sake of the initial, which was also that of my real name. In this way I felt I mitigated the fantasy or deception; and it helped in school reports, where I was simply Singh R. From the age of eight till the age of twelve this was one of my heavy secrets. I feared discovery at school and at home. The truth came out when we were preparing to leave the elementary school and our records were being put in order for Isabella Imperial College. Birth certificates were required.

‘Singh, does this certificate belong to you?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t see it from here.’

Funny man. It says here Ranjit Kripalsingh. Are you he? Or have you entered the school incognito?’

So I had to explain.

‘Ranjit is my secret name,’ I said. ‘It is a custom among Hindus of certain castes. This secret name is my real name but it ought not to be used in public.’

‘But this leaves you anonymous.’

‘Exactly. That’s where the calling name of Ralph is useful. The calling name is unimportant and can be taken in vain by anyone.’

Such was the explanation I managed, though it was not in these exact words nor in this tone. In fact, as I remember, I stood close to the teacher and spoke almost in a whisper. He was a man who prided himself on his broad-mindedness. He looked humble, acquiring strange knowledge. We went on to talk about the Singh, and I explained I had merely revived an ancient fracture. Puzzlement replaced interest. At last he said, loudly, so that the others heard: ‘Boy, do you live by yourself?’ So, in kind laughter, the matter ended at school. But there remained my father. He was not pleased at having to sign an affidavit that the son he had sent out into the world as Ranjit Kripalsingh had been transformed into Ralph Singh. He saw it as an affront, a further example of the corrupting influence of Cecil and my mother’s family.

I have given a flippant account of this episode. Flippancy comes easily when we write of past pain; it disguises and mocks that pain. I have no material hardships to record, as is clear. But observe how weighted down I was with secrets: the secret of my father, who was only an embittered schoolteacher, the secret of that word wife, the secret of my name. And to this was added a secret which overrode them all. It was the secret of being ‘marked’. From inquiries I have since made I believe this will be understood right away or not understood at all. I felt, to give my own symptoms, that I was in some way protected; a celestial camera recorded my every movement, impartially, without judgement or pity. I was marked; I was of interest; I would survive. This knowledge gave me strength at difficult moments, but it remained my most shameful secret.

So many secrets! I longed to be rid of them all. But it was difficult in Isabella. It was difficult at that school and with those boys. We had converted our island into one big secret. Anything that touched on everyday life excited laughter when it was mentioned in a classroom: the name of a shop, the name of a street, the name of street-corner foods. The laughter denied our knowledge of these things to which after the hours of school we were to return. We denied the landscape and the people we could see out of open doors and windows, we who took apples to the teacher and wrote essays about visits to temperate farms. Whether we dissected a hibiscus flower or recited the names of Isabellan birds, school remained a private hemisphere.

There was a boy called Hok in my class. I liked him for his looks, his intelligence, his slightly awkward body, his girl-like way of throwing a ball. He had long, well-articulated fingers which he was in the habit of rubbing together whenever he was nervous. I envied him his elegant manner, and I believe he envied me my manner. With Deschampsneufs I had belching matches. With Hok I had another sort of competition. The class had decided that we were both ‘nervous’; we each decided to be more nervous than the other. We might gaze at the ceiling during a lesson and not hear the master’s call to attend. We ate paper while we spoke. I couldn’t keep up with Hok here. He was a reckless eater, and once during a lesson ate a whole page of a textbook before remarking on its absence. I, aware of the occasional surveillance of my father the schoolmaster at home, had to be content with the odd corner. I began to chew my collar; Hok almost ate his off. I ate my school tie to rags; the end of Hok’s tie was never out of his mouth; he chewed it like gum. Between us was another bond. We were both secret readers of strange books. We often caught sight of one another in the Carnegie Library; then we became furtive or tried to hide, each unwilling to reveal the books he was interested in. But I found out about Hok. He was working his way through the Chinese section. His name indicated Chinese ancestry, but he was not pure Chinese. He had some admixture of Syrian or European blood with, I felt, a tincture of African. It was a happy blend; it had produced a sensitive, attractive boy.

Sometimes our class was taken to the Training College, to give the learner-teachers there practice. In our crocodile we were the object of attention of various sorts, to the embarrassment and sometimes fury of our teacher. But in our crocodile we were also in our private hemisphere, and we walked through the streets of our city like disrespectful tourists, to whom everything that was familiar to the resident was quaint and a cause for mirth: a snatch of conversation, the shout of a vendor, a donkey-cart. We were enjoying the sights of our city in this way one morning when some of the boys began to titter and whip their fingers, calling the teacher’s attention.

One boy said, ‘Sir, Hok went past his mother just now and he didn’t say anything at all to her.’

The teacher, revealing unexpected depths, was appalled. ‘Is this true, Hok? Your mother, boy?’

The crocodile came to a halt. Hok looked down at the pavement and went purple, rubbing his hands together. We looked for the mother, the hidden creature whom Hok saw every day, had said goodbye to that morning and was to see again in two hours or so at lunchtime. She was indeed a surprise, a Negro woman of the people, short and rather fat, quite unremarkable. She waddled away, indifferent herself to the son she had just brushed past, a red felt hat on her head, swinging her basket, doubtless bound for the market.

‘Hok!’ the teacher said. ‘Go and talk to your mother.’

He blew a whistle and we all stood to attention, exaggerating the military posture, the more greatly to impress the onlookers, the native, the ordinary. Hok continued to look down at his shoes and rub his hands, scraping alternate palms with his fingers.

‘Hok, go this minute and talk to your mother!’

She was receding serenely.

Hok turned and began to walk towards her slowly. She was almost at the corner. Soon she would have disappeared.

‘Hok, run! Do you hear me? Run!’ And the teacher himself ran after Hok, threatening him with his tamarind rod.

Hok shot off, running in his awkward girl’s way, and we who were secure and unbetrayed stood to attention and watched. We saw him gain on the dumpy little figure with the hat and the market basket, saw the figure, doubtless disturbed by the sound of running feet, turn in some agitation before Hok had caught up with her, saw the head inclining towards Hok, the black cartoon face to Hok’s purple, then saw them separate, the woman going round the corner, Hok turning and coming slowly back towards us, his purple face swollen as if about to burst, Hok the nervous, the secret reader, the eater of paper and ties, now totally betrayed and as ordinary as the street. The poor boy was crying.

It was for this betrayal into ordinariness that I knew he was crying. It was at this betrayal that the brave among us were tittering. It wasn’t only that the mother was black and of the people, though that was a point; it was that he had been expelled from that private hemisphere of fantasy where lay his true life. The last book he had been reading was The Heroes. What a difference between the mother of Perseus and that mother! What a difference between the white, blue and dark green landscapes he had so recently known and that street! Between the street and the Chinese section of the Carnegie Library; between that placid shopping mother and the name of Confucius her son had earned among us for his wit and beauty. I felt I had been given an unfair glimpse of another person’s deepest secrets. I felt on that street, shady, with gardens, and really pretty as I now recall it, though then to me wholly drab, that Hok had dreams like mine, was probably also marked, and lived in imagination far from us, far from the island on which he, like my father, like myself, had been shipwrecked.

I must explain. I cherished my mother’s family and their Bella Bella Bottling Works. But in my secret life I was the son of my father, and a Singh. China was the subject of Hok’s secret reading. Mine was of Rajputs and Aryans, stories of knights, horsemen and wanderers. I had even read Tod’s difficult volumes. I had read of the homeland of the Asiatic and Persian Aryans, which some put as far away as the North Pole. I lived a secret life in a world of endless plains, tall bare mountains, white with snow at their peaks, among nomads on horseback, daily pitching my tent beside cold green mountain torrents that raged over grey rock, waking in the mornings to mist and rain and dangerous weather. I was a Singh. And I would dream that all over the Central Asian plains the horsemen looked for their leader. Then a wise man came to them and said, ‘You are looking in the wrong place. The true leader of you lies far away, shipwrecked on an island the like of which you cannot visualize.’ Beaches and coconut trees, mountains and snow: I set the pictures next to one another.

It was at these moments that I found the island most unbearable. Study the paradox of my fantasy. I looked about me minutely; I was pained. And I discovered I was more pained than most. I was driving with Cecil’s father one day along a country road. We were in the area of swamps. Sodden thatched huts, set in mud, lined the road. It was a rainy day, grey, the sky low and oppressive, the water in the ditches thick and black, people everywhere semi-naked, working barefooted in the mud which discoloured their bodies and faces and their working rags. I was more than saddened, more than angry. I felt endangered. My mood must have communicated itself to Cecil’s father, for at that moment he said, ‘My people.’

I wonder why those calm words had such an effect on me. I hated the speaker. For the first time he had disappointed me. I had thought of him as ascetic and fair and pious. I thought that these qualities, which I admired, had come to him with that money and success to which I was so devoted; and for a long time, even after this incident, I attributed these qualities to people who had made their money the hard way. I admired his lack of show, his separation of his business life from his home life. I noted his quiet, sincere taste. In his back veranda, where other people would have had things like thermometers from the tyre companies and calendars from various firms, he had religious pictures and photographs of Indian film actors. He was not interested in the cinema and photographs of Hollywood stars in a private house would have struck him as hopelessly vulgar. But the Indian actors in his back veranda were on a level with the religious pictures: together they were an act of piety towards his past, a reverencing of the land of his ancestors. Details like this had gone towards the making of my picture of him.

And now I was disappointed. I imagine I had expected more passion and more pain. But I kept my thoughts to myself and merely said, ‘Why can’t they give them leggings?’ ‘They’ were the Stockwell estates, whose overseers’ houses, tall concrete pillars, cream concrete walls, red corrugated-iron roofs, presently appeared, rather close together, with no gardens to speak of and as bare of trees as the sugarcane fields in which they were set. Miserable crop! But the pain I felt was my own. Cecil’s father said, ‘Leggings cost money.’

The fields fell behind. The road ran between shops and two-storeyed houses. Traffic was slower in the main road of the small town and we were driving behind a lorry loaded with floursacks covered by a wet tarpaulin. On this tarpaulin lay two Indian loaders, soaked through. They studied us. Cecil’s father had the ability of his age to ignore such scrutiny. I returned the scrutiny; it was the scrutiny of compassion still. There was nothing of compassion in the restless gaze of our driver; he was merely impatient to overtake and get on. His chance, as he thought, came. But he had miscalculated the speed of the oncoming car, and he had to cut in in front of the lorry, which braked with a squeal. He was a new driver, glad of the job and anxious to keep it; the silence in our car deepened into strain. At the next slowing-up our driver was too cautious. The lorry overtook us and instantly cut in. The loaders were no longer lying down. They were sitting up. They began to abuse us. I have always hated obscenity; it was doubly hateful to have to listen to it with Cecil’s father. We turned up the windows. The loaders turned to obscene gestures and the gestures of threat. They indicated that they had our number and would hunt us down and shoot us and cutlass us. For minutes this went on.

At last we cleared the town and on the open road the lorry pulled away. Our driver made no attempt to keep up. When the lorry was out of sight Cecil’s father broke down. As he spoke he lost control of himself. He clenched and unclenched his fists, struck his palms and struck the back of the driver’s seat. The driver, out of sympathy and perhaps also because he feared assault, pulled up on the verge and, with his hands on the steering wheel, looked ahead past the clicking windscreen wipers.

‘Why you make me suffer like this?’ Cecil’s father asked the driver. ‘Why you make me suffer?’

‘I got his number, boss.’

‘You got his number, you got his number. What good that will do? You put me in the position of listening to all that.’

‘Telephone Mr Mitchell, boss. They will find out about the loaders and fix them up.’

‘Telephone Mr Mitchell, telephone Mr Mitchell. Hello, Mr Mitchell, some damn illiterate people insult me for ten minutes on the road this morning, and my own driver was in the wrong.’ He went wild. He was Cecil’s father and subject to the same somewhat unbalanced rages.

I tried to calm him down. ‘They were only loaders, Nana.’

This excited him more than ever. He howled and slapped his forehead. ‘They make me shame. They make me shame. Oh, my God!’ And in the parked car, close with the windows up, he behaved as though he had just been told he had lost a fortune. The bottler of Coca-Cola, the Isabella millionaire, the nominated Member of the Council.

At first, during that drive, I had felt endangered. Now I thought I saw how easy it was to destroy. A man was only what he saw of himself in others, and an intimation came to me of chieftainship in that island. This was my political awakening. This might be said to have been my first political lesson. A leader of my people? A biter of the hand that fed me? Or simply a Singh, avenging a personal shipwreck? Whatever the impulse, that lesson, so easily learned, so easily carried out when the time came, was an exceedingly simple and foolish one.

2

CECIL sometimes came home with me after school. I was always pleased when he did. I liked Cecil. He was the opposite of Hok but in his own way just as attractive. I liked his confidence and his wildness. I liked his lefthander’s gestures, that lift of the shoulder when he walked. He was impulsively generous; his father used to say, with greater truth than any of us then knew, that Cecil was born to give away. I liked to give Cecil things too. But I had little to give him. The only interesting thing our house had was paper, headed or plain, from the Education Department. My father brought home quantities; he said that the stealing of paper was not really stealing. I used to give Cecil some of this paper. His delight puzzled me; I never knew what he used the paper for.

We were going through my father’s desk one day, both Cecil and I looking for something I could give Cecil, when we came upon a worn little booklet with photographs of naked women, blurred or depilated in patches. Plump little bodies in foolish attitudes: the weak enticing the weak. I was astonished and as ashamed as when I heard the loaders’ obscenities in Cecil’s father’s car. I told Cecil that the photographs were mine, partly to ease the shame and partly to suggest to him that I had resources of vice he had not suspected. I said he could have them. I had ‘used’ them — I don’t know how the word came to me — and I no longer needed them. He was greatly excited, so excited that he forgot to carry out the threat of nailing a Coca-Cola cap to my father’s desk.

He took the booklet to school next day. It created a sensation. It caught the attention of the teachers as well and was passed among them from hand to hand until it rested on the headmaster’s desk. Cecil said the book was mine and when I was asked I said this was so. I was not flogged. Instead I was regarded with awe, especially after I had repeated the sentence about not needing the pictures since I had ‘used’ them. A letter was written to my father, which I delivered. He came to the school and we had a confrontation in the headmaster’s room below the neat time-table that was never followed and the board that contained the names of brilliant past scholars. The booklet lay isolated on the headmaster’s desk like a thing that could not be of interest to any of the three of us. The headmaster looked from my father to me. My father did not look at me and I did not look at him. I wished all the time to transmit to him the message that I did not think less of him for being interested in these pictures: he after all had a ‘wife’ and was only yielding to a widespread weakness. My father suffered. He was an honest man. The headmaster pressed him but he could not bring himself to condemn me. ‘I will talk to him. I will talk to him,’ he kept on saying.

He never did. It was only on that Friday, library day for me, that there was something like a sequel. I was in our back gallery reading The Aryan Peoples and Their Migrations. It was an old book with an old smell; every time I opened it the spine cracked; I believe I was the first person to take it out of the library. It was not an easy book to read.

My father came in, his bicycle clips still on, his sharkskin jacket sagging and dirty at the pockets, his face tired, his eyes watery behind his glasses.

‘What are you reading today?’

I showed him.

‘You can go and impress your mother’s family with that. They can’t read without moving their lips or turn a page without licking their finger. But don’t try to fool me, you hear. You understanding what you read?’

‘But of course.’

‘You are a damned liar. Aryan-waryan, what the hell do you know about that?’

I remembered how at school Browne, being seen with a Tarzan book, explained in his clowning way to the master, ‘I only read books of commonsense, sir.’ So now I said, ‘I only read books of commonsense.’

I really believed he was going to hit me. And when he pulled the book out of my hands, so roughly that he tore the brittle cover from its binding, I thought he was going to hit me with that. But he merely opened the book at random and asked, ‘What is the meaning of homogeneous?’

We underestimate our strength and throw away our hand. Up till that moment the advantage had been mine; but now, faced with the home version of The Coca-Cola Quiz, I panicked and said, ‘I didn’t bring the book home for me. I brought it for you.’

‘Damned liar.’

‘I won’t listen to this. You know that cricket bat you gave me for Christmas? I am going to give it to Cecil. I don’t want to touch it now.’

‘Give it to Cecil. The poor always give to the rich.’

I brought Cecil home on Monday and showed him the bat. I had left it in the front veranda with a formal note that I no longer wished to make use of this present from my father. In a way this was true, for I had given up as commonplace the fantasy in which, going to the cricket ground during an international match, I had been discovered with this bat, had been instantly picked — one of the batsmen’s bats being broken and the batsman discarded with his bat — and had saved the side. I asked Cecil whether he wanted the bat. He read the note and it upset me that he didn’t, like my mother, coax me to keep the bat. He simply tore the note off, crumpled it up and threw it into the garden. He said that legally the bat was now his and I was not to touch it without his permission. He was a strange boy, Cecil. I was miserable afterwards.

My father broke a few things when he got home and found I had given the bat away. He went to his room and I heard him talking to himself. Late in the evening he went out. He stopped at the parlour at the corner for a soft drink. Something must have happened there to irritate him, because without any provocation he began to break the place up. It was a simple breaking-up at first, but soon my father began to concentrate on Coca-Cola. He broke bottle after bottle; and, being continually armed with jagged Coca-Cola necks, he terrified the poor shopkeeper. He broke ninety-six bottles in all, four full cases, breaking one bottle after another, methodically, as though he had been paid to do it; he didn’t just lift a Coca-Cola case and smash it on the floor. My mother ran out when a neighbour brought the news. The police had also been called, and the police in this case was a young policeman whom my father had often summoned in the past to quell disturbances in the street: the unlicensed butchering of animals in backyards, the playing of games on the pavement and so on. The matter fortunately didn’t get into the courts or the newspapers. We compensated everyone generously.

The incident brought my father considerable local renown and not a little respect among the idlers of the neighbourhood. It was the loaders’ cursing of Cecil’s father all over again. No one had anything against the shopkeeper, who was always ready to give trust and didn’t charge interest; he would give you a glass of water if you asked for it, even if you bought nothing. It was only that the shopkeeper was rich and the idlers were poor and were glad to see how easily the rich could be made ridiculous. But what was most unsettling about this unhappy incident was its effect on my father. He behaved as though he had had an access of madness and couldn’t be held responsible for what he had done that Monday evening. But it was clear he enjoyed the new renown. He sported his bandages and plaster with quiet pride — his hands had been badly cut about, and there were also cuts on his face and chest — during the fortnight’s sick leave he got from the Education Department. He began to presume on the affection of people on the street. He, who before had kept himself to himself, now had no hesitation in asking a street idler to help him mend a bicycle puncture or dig the garden. It was astonishing how readily he got the help he asked for. Madness, but there was method in it, even if the method came afterwards.

My sisters and I spent more of our time with my mother’s family. We went there every week-end and soon our clothes and other possessions were divided between the two houses. My sisters joined Sally’s court and so became even more removed from me. This was no loss. They were good-looking girls, but their looks were a source of mortification to me. It was the tradition among schoolboys in Isabella, as perhaps elsewhere, that the brothers of beautiful girls were in some way effeminate, and were to be ridiculed on that account. As much as I suppressed my father, then, I suppressed my sisters. They grew away from me as a result; they never again became close. I thought their attitude to my father extreme. They said to Sally and the others that they were not responsible for him and were generally more severe than Cecil even, who saw some humour in the parlour incident.

Cecil’s father built a beach house and decreed a long holiday there. He was one of the first in Isabella to build a beach house. Today of course the beaches of tropical islands have been turned into suburbs and have the same regulated meanness of population and aspect. I have no doubt they will fall into the same disrepute; but by then the work of destruction will have been complete. At the time of which I write, however, it was still held that beaches were to be wild and uninhabited and without even a shed for changing. You took care to put two or three hundred yards between yourself and the next bathing party; and if that was impossible you said that the beach was crowded and went home, hoping for better luck next time. At that time a beach house was a novelty, and throughout the school term we had heard talk about it from Cecil and Sally.

But there was an awkwardness. My sisters and I had not been invited. About a trip to the beach, wild and uninhabited, there was still, among us, an element of venture-someness, as about a voyage itself; and no one was willing to take the responsibility for us during a beach holiday of some weeks. Neither Cecil’s parents nor my mother wished to ask my father for his permission, for fear of underlining our separation from him; and we were unwilling to ask ourselves, for fear of being refused. Accordingly, exercising our rights of dual residence, we did nothing. Cecil’s parents’ house was going to be shut up; we doubted that we would be shut up with it or ordered back to our own house. My mother encouraged us by her silence. The day of departure found us packed with the others and, still without invitation, waiting to go. Of course we went.

The sea broke on us almost without warning. Only a height of sky and a quality of openness behind the tops of trees suggested that a little way beyond there was no more land. And then, at the end of an avenue of coconut trees, was the living, destroying element, almost colourless at this distance. The trees swayed and rustled and crackled. The white surf crashed and hissed on the wide beach. Among the trees, the two-storeyed timber house. No garden, no yard, no fence: just sand and the unnatural plants and vines, glittering green, that grew in hot salt sand. Not my element. I preferred land; I preferred mountains and snow.

Night came, moonlit or black, spectral or empty; and nothing could be heard except the wind and the trees. Beach houses were not for me. Not for me this feeling of abandonment at the end of the empty world. Even Cecil appeared chastened. The girls gathered around an oil-lamp and, in all the sea din, spoke in whispers. At the end, when it was not really very late, we played draughts. I was good at draughts and with every game got better. I played Cecil. He said ‘Aah!’ and scrambled the counters when he saw he was losing. I played my sisters and beat them. I beat Sally. She offered to play me again. I beat her again and she cried. She stamped up to bed, shouting that I was conceited.

It was a relief to find in the morning that the world was still there. As soon as I could I went outside. There was dew on the vines and the coconut husks. The tide was ebbing; there was a new tidewrack of wet litter; the wind was fresh. Far away on the beach I could see the stripped remains of a great tree, washed up, I had been told, months before, coming from heaven knows what island or continent, drifting on the ocean night and day for weeks, for months, for a year, until stranded on our island, on this desolate beach. I had thoughts, too alarming to pursue, about things existing only when seen. I went back to the house and found them getting ready for breakfast. Above the salt of the wind was the smell of simmering chocolate and fried plantains.

Then Sally came stamping down the stairs in her yellow seersucker housecoat. Both the garment and the material had come to Isabella at the same time and had become the rage; even my sisters wandered about after school in wide-lapelled seersucker housecoats, showing little bits of slip as they walked. In her yellow seersucker housecoat, then, Sally came stamping down the stairs. She was as distressed as she had been when she went up the previous night. ‘Somebody used my toothbrush!’ she sobbed, and waved the tainted instrument.

The older women were at once concerned — Sally the beautiful, the delicate — and they hurried to console the melodramatically outraged daughter of that melodramatic family. Their concern did not exceed mine. As soon as Sally spoke I knew it was I who had used her toothbrush. I could taste the toothpaste again. I felt dreadfully unclean. I ran up the steps past her to rinse my mouth out. ‘It’s him! It’s him!’ Sally shouted. Her tears vanished even while she stamped. She giggled; she laughed. At breakfast she didn’t let me forget.

Afterwards I walked by myself along the shining desolate beach. I observed vines and shells and weed and sand-crabs and the almost transparent small fish that each roller brought right in and very nearly stranded. I wondered whether I shouldn’t take the bus back to the city. I walked towards the village. It was grey, rusty and rotting: the rust of old tin, the grey of rotting wood. In a café shack I had a Pepsi-Cola and a turnover cake with hot sugared coconut inside. I walked along the bumpy asphalted road out of the village, away from the sea. I got queer looks from people behind their hibiscus hedges, people to whom this part of the island was the world, people who, I had been told, all their lives never travelled five miles beyond their birthplace. It was the looks that after an hour or so turned me back towards the village. It was hot. The leaves were still and appeared about to quail. The asphalt, laid on in pure, rippled pats, was already soft underfoot. Here, away from the sea, the freshness of the day had already been burnt off.

In the village shadows had contracted to edgings around huts and to faint glare-shot patterns below trees. On the beach, which I had left empty, there was now a sprinkling of people and activity of a sort. The sand was not fresh. What had been level and shining clean now had the look of something sullied. It had been scuffed and scored, abraded in irregular patches, and littered with red and pale blue entrails already gone flat and lacklustre. Pariah dogs, ribby and of nondescript colour, fawn or pale yellow, wandered about with their long tails between their legs. The heat of the sand penetrated the soles of my canvas shoes. More people appeared on the beach. But being by now part of the activity I had noticed from a distance, it struck me that the activity was curiously muted, without a centre. Some people looked at the sea. Many more stood idly on the sand. Some stood beside the fishermen, who sat mending their nets in the no-shade under coconut trees next to their rough but brightly painted boats. The mixed Carib and African descent of these fishermen showed in their expressionless faces, burnt by sun and salt and wind to a blackness so pure it had ceased to be a noticeable colour. About me on the beach movement was continuous, but unhurried and undefined. From the refreshment shack where I had earlier had the Pepsi-Cola and the turnover came the gramophone. I remember the song it played. It was Bésame Mucho. Words and music rose above the wind and surf and went out ragged over that ragged crowded beach. Then I heard. People were drowning. There in that infernal devouring element people were drowning. The fishermen were being begged to go out and save them. The fishermen sat on the roots of coconut trees and mended their nets and stripped lengths of canes for their fishpots. Their lean Carib-black faces were like masks. I imagined myself drowning. And in this imagining I became detached; feeling no anger against the fishermen who, as I could hear now, were talking among themselves in their patois; feeling only the feebleness and absurdity of any attempt to rescue those persons, already bodies, hidden in that turquoise water beyond the breakers. The visitors, the people on holiday, were frightened; the locals were as calm as the fishermen. To me, standing in my detachment, my overwhelming fear of death, the story came in snatches. A brother had swum out to save his drowning sisters and had himself disappeared. The tide was ebbing fast: they would all be carried far out. So many versions in a short time I heard of that rescue effort by the brother. He had been frantic and foolish and had exhausted himself too soon. He had tried to fight through the breakers and had not swum under them; he had been dashed and twisted and broken on the sea bed. He was a townsman, he couldn’t swim. So many stories.

In my fear I turned away and walked back to the beach house. So private a fear it was, so private a sensation of the weakness of the flesh — these poor arms, these poor feet, this vulnerable head — it was shame for the weakness of the flesh that kept me from telling the story to the women. They took my silence for distress at the incident of the early morning and were kind. I accepted their kindness; as though I had taken on for all mankind the weight of the tragedy of flesh and the body I had just witnessed; and this comforting, this service at the hands of women, was fitting.

So it was Cecil who brought the news, and I pretended to hear it for the first time. Then we all ran out, the girls in their bathing suits tripping along the beach, now at low tide very wide, Cecil running far from us through the edge of the foaming water, taking high, splashing steps, an odd celebratory figure. The sand was like the sand of a tainted arena. The fishermen had disappeared. Their boats were out. The cork floats of the seine were in a wide arc on the sea beyond the breakers. Two boats were coming through the breakers in a confusion of white water; suddenly they were clear and driven down and up almost to the limit of the sea; they were being beached. The crowd split and ran to the two boats to take hold of the rope to pull in the seine. The story of the drownings came to us again. It was just before two, the period of stillness between morning and afternoon. The fishermen pulled in their measured way; the visitors and townspeople, already recognizable by their clothes, pulled frantically, as in a tug-of-war contest. And that record still played in the café. Still those words rode over wind and coconut branches. Bésame mucho, como si fuera la última vez. The absurd words of popular songs I Then I recognized Deschampsneufs and perhaps members of his family among the frantic pullers. I did not want to be observed. I stood aside. Until then the whole extended incident had been a private moment; now I became an observer.

The arc of the cork floats steadily contracted. It came in closer and closer. It cleared the breakers. Net appeared. Then came shouts. The dragging of the sea! Such an endeavour, so futile, like something in The Heroes. Yet it had produced results. The first body appeared, the second, the third. They had all died together, the rolling, drifting bodies, mingled now, as the seine came in to the shore, with fish, alive and silver. There were the fish we called the dogfish, attracted by death, people said. And there were thousands of little fish. And soon everything lay strained and dry on the dirty beach. The fish lay flapping on the sand, curving in brief spasms. The dogfish, threats until a minute ago, lay expiring, and people went among them as though animated by personal revenge and mangled their heads.

The bodies were laid out side by side on the sand in the sun, the bathing costumes still like living parts of them, wet as my own costume would have been if I had been swimming. Away from the group around the stretched-out bodies little arguments had started between the fishermen and some of the people who had helped to pull the seine. The people wanted the fish; the fishermen wanted money for the fish; the people said the fishermen had already been paid, and just for casting the seine. One toothless fisherman continually spoke obscenities. Eventually it was settled. I believe the fisherman got their money. The bodies were taken away; and on the low-tide beach, shining everywhere else, there remained matt marks where the bodies had lain, scrapings and scratchings and scuffed sand to show, just for a few more hours, what had happened. The beach was strewn with small fish, so recently whole and now so dull, so like garbage, silver turning to dark grey. The pariah dogs prowled nervously. The vultures watched from the coconut trees. The stingray, on its brown back, its underside bluish-white, showed a bloody stump where its tail had been hacked off.

The beach in this section of our island stretched for more than twenty miles, broken at intervals by the neat channels of streams, fresh but brackish, that flowed into the ocean from the cocoteraie. Coconut trees and beach and the white of breakers seemed to meet at a point in the distance. It was not possible to see where coconut turned to mangrove and swampland. Here and there, interrupting the straight line of beach, were the trunks of trees washed up by the sea. I set myself to walk to one tree, then to the other. I was soon far away from the village and from people, and was alone on the beach, smooth and shining silver in the dying light. No coconut now, but mangrove, tall on the black cages of their roots. From the mangrove swamps channels ran to the ocean between sand banks that were daily made and broken off, as neatly as if cut by machines, shallow channels of clear water touched with the amber of dead leaves, cool to the feet, different from the warm sea. On the beach itself the banks of these channels, the tide now rising, were continually undermined, fell off in vertical sections; and then the process of rounding and undermining began again: a geography lesson in miniature, with time speeded up. Here lay the tree, fast in the sand which was deep and level around it; impossible now to shift, what once had floated lightly on the waters, coming to the end of its journey at a particular moment; the home now of scores of alien creatures, which scattered at my approach. Here the island was like a place still awaiting Columbus and discovery.

And what was an unmarked boy doing here, shipwrecked chieftain on an unknown shore, awaiting rescue, awaiting the arrival of ships of curious shape to take him back to his mountains? Poor boy, poor leader. But I was not unmarked. The camera was in the sky. It followed the boy, tiny from such a height, who walked at the edge of the sea beside the mangrove of a distant island, an island as lost and deserted as those which, in films like The Black Swan, to soft rippling music, to the bellying of sails of ancient ships, appeared in the clear morning light to the anxious man on deck. Not unmarked. Therefore there was to be no fear. Back through the late afternoon, already turning to night, along the empty beach with its immemorial noise, I walked without fear.

Pinpoints of light, winking, never still, appeared in the distance, like things imagined in the darkness. It was the day of the full moon, when female crabs came out of their holes and went to the waters to wash the eggs they carried on the underside of their bellies, and were surprised by electric torches and captured. I walked towards the dancing lights. I crossed the crab-catchers. They wore hats and were buttoned up against the night breeze. I had exhausted my mood when I came within sight of the beach house, its dim lights diffused more dimly through the tangled coconut gloom.

There was a small figure on the beach stamping on the sand. It was Cecil. He was stamping out his name in huge letters, really enormous letters. It was just the sort of idleness to which he devoted himself with energy. I stood and watched him as the moon came up. We didn’t speak. I knew he was expecting me either to help him stamp out his name or to begin my own. I made no move to do either. I left him there and walked towards the house. It didn’t surprise me that he abandoned his name and followed me. I heard When I Grow Too Old to Dream on the gramophone. Through an open window I saw that the girls were dancing. I went to the window and leaned on the ledge. It was gritty and sticky with sand and salt.

I said: ‘Sally, do you know what I think you are?’

She fell into the trap. She said, ‘No, what?’

‘I think you are a fool.’

I had the pleasure of seeing her stamp.

At school I never mentioned my seaside holiday. I let Deschampsneufs tell of the drownings and his effort with the seine and listened as one to whom it was all new.

So at last, in this matter of relationships at any rate, I began to eliminate and simplify. I concentrated on school and relationships within that private hemisphere. I did not take to my books or become a crammer: I still retained my pride. Cecil was prepared to admire a brilliant student; and his father often quietly gave money and other help to poor and promising boys of various races. But the feeling still existed among us that education was mainly for the lower classes. I did not go so far myself. My ideal was to be brilliant without appearing to try. But though I thought this was just what Hok brought off, I gave up competing with him in this business of being ‘nervous’.

I took up sport. I put my name down for cricket. I thought I would be a bowler and needless to say I wished to bowl very fast. I took a long run and not infrequently at the end lost control of both the run and the ball. I did not last on any side. But the effort was not wasted. I lost some of my selfconsciousness. It takes some doing, after all, to put on the absurd garb of the cricketer and to walk with a straight face to the middle! Hok and his supporters scoffed at my new character. I did not mind. I had my compensation in the astonishing number of boys who, in spite of my obvious failures, accepted me as a sportsman. While I was ‘nervous’ I was in fact unsure of myself. Seeing myself as weak and variable and clinging, I had looked for similar weaknesses in others. This was the cynicism I now arrested. The discovery that many were willing to take me for what I said I was was pure joy. It was like a revelation of wholeness.

I do not wish to claim too much for the playing fields of Isabella Imperial, or rather — to diminish the grandeur and destroy the comparison the plural unavoidably evokes — its somewhat ragged cricket pitch. But it was there that I acquired a certain composure and a certain attitude. I could not at the time formulate that attitude. But it was an attitude, I now see, towards the fact of an audience. And it was this. An audience is never important. An audience is made up of individuals most of whom are likely to be your inferiors. A disagreeable confession; but I have never believed the actor who says he ‘loves’ his audience. He loves his audience in the way he might love his dogs. The successful public performer in whatever field operates, not perhaps from contempt, but from a profound lack of regard for his audience. The actor is separate from those who applaud him; the leader, and particularly the popular leader, is separate from the led. My later career as a public speaker and handler of men surprised many and was seen by some as a violent breaking out of character. It did not appear so to me. The public speaker was only another version of the absurd schoolboy cricketer, selfconsciousness suppressed, the audience ignored, at the nets of Isabella Imperial.

Alas for theory! Alas for abiding fears! Attend to the sequel. A chance for athletic distinction, as I thought, presently offered itself. The occasion was the annual Isabella Imperial sports. It was clear to me that I stood every chance of winning the hundred yards, the two-twenty and the four-forty in my group. The reasons were special and are now not quite clear in my own mind. It had to do with the entry date or my birthday or a combination of both — one day or so either way would have made all the difference; and to this was added the fact that the kindergarten of Isabella Imperial, abolished some years before, then briefly revived, had just been finally abolished and the toddlers incorporated into the main school. For them there were two groups, one under eleven or under ten the other under thirteen or twelve. It was in this last group that a unique chance had placed me. And in this group I was like a giant. Because of the stop-and-start intake of the kindergarten I was competing with children who were fifteen or eighteen months younger. The childish, blotted signatures of entrants on the notice-board confirmed this happy fact.

I took up athletics. I made my mother get me running shorts and I practised assiduously in the college grounds in the afternoons. I imitated the older athletes. After a practice run I did not simply stop. I ran myself down slowly, reining myself in, so that at the end I was like a dancer, elbows high, lightly clenched arms extended and working in rhythm with the high-lifted legs. It amused me to see my juvenile rivals, a scramble of brittle little limbs at one end of the playing field, also practising in this way. They too rubbed themselves down with Canadian Healing Oil or Sloan’s Liniment, like me, like the older athletes with developed, hairy legs.

My new character did not pass unnoticed at home. It was put down to the influence of Cecil and aroused distaste in my father, quiet pleasure in my mother, and pride and relief in my sisters who, having given up my father, had no close male to lean on or talk about. The women liked the running shorts, the exposed and massaged limbs, the promise of a manhood which, with my ‘nervousness’, must have seemed to them somewhat delayed. My father’s distaste I interpreted as jealousy; it gave me an unpleasant feeling. Unpleasant too was the interest of the women. Isabella Imperial had been divided some time before, quite arbitrarily, by a headmaster fresh from England, into houses, the idea no doubt being that the division would encourage team spirit and competitiveness. The idea had fallen flat. But the houses and their emblems, devised by this same headmaster, had remained. They came to life once a year, on sports day. My mother began to embroider the red emblem of my house on my running vest. She worked on it with love, elaborating in her own fanciful way on an already fanciful design. She worked on it evening after evening, as a woman works on baby clothes. The baby-clothes preparations at home were matched by the week-long preparation of the ground at school: the marking out of lanes, the sticking up of little flags, the erection of tents and marquees. I began to feel that my endeavour was not only unimportant but was being taken out of my hands. I finally lost my temper when I discovered that my sisters had begun to assume that they were going to the sports. I objected. They insisted; they had been making their own preparations. I became abusive. They abused me back. To punish me, they decided they would leave me alone and have nothing more to do with me. I was relieved: it had been a close thing.

The day came. Breakfast astonished me. We usually breakfasted simply, just cocoa or tea with buttered bread and sometimes avocadoes or plantains. Now I was given orange juice, corn flakes, eggs, toast and jam. To me such a breakfast was associated with high days and for this reason was slightly repugnant. All ritual embarrassed me, and I was doubly embarrassed that this day should have been deemed a high day. I was jumpy and it was only when I was alternately crunching and squelching through the corn flakes that I recalled, with shame, the dream I had had. It was a double dream, the dream within the dream, when the dreamer, fearful for the reality of his joy, questions himself whether he is dreaming and decides he is not. I had dreamt that I was a baby again and at my mother’s breast. What joy! The breast on my cheek and mouth: a consoling weight, the closeness of soft, smooth flesh. It had been at dusk, in a vague setting, no lights, in a back veranda, all around a blur of dark bush. My mother rocked and I had the freedom of her breast. A dream? But no, I was not dreaming. What pain then, what shame, to awaken!

Seeing her now, the embroiderer of my house colours, so unsuspecting, I felt secret added to secret, weight to weight. But with lucidity and the ordinary light of day the shame passed. Just before lunch I put on the vest with the red badge and covered it with my shirt. And I was surprised by a feeling of high pleasure when, after kissing my mother on the fern-hung veranda of our old-fashioned timber house, I stepped out into the street and was alone, free of mother and sisters, without a father: myself alone. The camera was in the sky. I was a man apart, disentangled from the camouflage of people. The street, usually to me so dull, was now an avenue to wonder.

But when I came to the residential area in which Isabella Imperial was set, something of the Saturday-afternoon lassitude of silent, wide-open houses made itself felt. My jumpiness returned; I was powerless to check it. And as soon as, entering the college grounds by the side gate, I saw the tents and the marquees and the carefully dressed men and women and boys and girls — hundreds of preparations like my own — I felt again the unimportance of my endeavour. My courage ebbed and was replaced by a type of weariness.

The sports began and the grounds were presently a confusion of unrelated and apparently private activities. The patient long distance runners plodded on unnoticed as if fulfilling a vow; there were practice sprints and practice starts and real races at the same time; you turned here and saw the long jump, you turned there and saw the high jump. Scattered about the bustling semi-nude were calm, fully dressed groups conversing or drinking. I saw my rivals. Many had their parents with them. Many were already stripped and displayed embroidered badges as fussy as my own, which was still hidden by my shirt. So many private preparations! When the announcement came, and the boys ambled over earnestly to the starting line and one or two made stylish practice starts, I knew I would never join them, not for that race or the others. They lined up; a master looked them over with a revolver in his hand. My decision was made; my weariness and feeling of unimportance vanished. The revolver was fired and the race was run. It was the hundred yards; it was over quickly and aroused little attention. The master was already himself running off somewhere else, silver whistle in his mouth, his tie flapping, a scribbling pad in one hand and the revolver in the other. I joined the traditional scrimmage for free ice-cream. Then I wandered about the marquees. After some time relief turned to insipidity and at the end, out of boredom as much as anything else, I took part in the four-forty handicap for the whole school — a free-for-all, no entrance fee or signing on required, small boys given a hundred or even two hundred yards’ distance — and so with the whole school, a moving multicoloured mangrove of legs, I ran, one pair of legs among many, my house badge still below my shirt. I dropped out and melted unnoticed into the crowd at the centre. Some of the carefully dressed men were now a little beaten up with drink and indulging in a final boisterousness; the girls were tired; the faces of the women were shining. But amid the traditional clowning of the four-forty there was still a pocket of official gravity, much shuffling of papers and comparing of notes: the prize-giving was to follow. The crowd was drifting towards the tent with cups and trophies.

I did not stay. My mother was waiting for me when I got home. She asked, ‘Well, what happened?’

‘I didn’t win.’

And on Monday morning my form master said to me, in front of the class, ‘That was a very sporting gesture of yours on Saturday. Though I had no doubt you would do the right thing.’

So the reputation as a sportsman not only endured but was enhanced; and the day became another of my secrets which I feared I might give away in my sleep or under chloroform, before an operation.

I wanted no more secrets like this, no more Saturday afternoons poisoned by a feeling of shipwreck and wrongness among crowds. I had already begun, as I thought, to simplify my relationships. But I had begun too late. I was too far sunk in the taint of fantasy. I wished to make a fresh, clean start. And it was now that I resolved to abandon the shipwrecked island and all on it, and to seek my chieftainship in that real world from which, like my father, I had been cut off. The decision brought its solace. Everything about me became temporary and unimportant; I was consciously holding myself back for the reality which lay elsewhere.

I have read that it was a saying of an ancient Greek that the first requisite for happiness was to be born in a famous city. It is one of those sayings which, because they deal with the particular and the concrete, like the instructions on a bottle of patent medicine, can appear flippant, except to those who have experienced their truth. To be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder. From an early age, almost from my first lesson at school about the weight of the king’s crown, I had sensed this. Now I was to discover that disorder has its own logic and permanence: the Greek was wise. Even as I was formulating my resolve to escape, there began that series of events which, while sharpening my desire to get away, yet rooted me more firmly to the locality where accident had placed me.

3

MY father became the possessor of a second-hand motorcar. It was one of those baby Austins of the thirties, quaint even at the time, which we in Isabella, more used to American motorcars, called matchboxes. I believe my father bought his car with an interest-free government loan: his duties in the Education Department required him to travel. On the street my father already had the engaging reputation of a bottle-breaker and café-wrecker; the arrival of the baby Austin, emblem of respectability and steadiness, turned him into a type of eccentric squire. They called him a ‘radical’. On Isabella this was a word of approval; it described an unconventional person or someone who was a ‘character’. With the car and all its attendant dignities and anxieties — petrol-buying, servicing, a constant commerce with inept but impressively greasy mechanics — a change came over my father. His interest in the world revived. He spoke more loudly at home and in public and he became possessed by an odd passion for wit. He repeated your sentences out of context and laughed; he replied to questions by asking absurd questions of his own; he took your phrases and turned them into awkward questions and laughed. It was disquieting. He wore a fixed, ugly grin whenever he was at the wheel of his car, his head slightly raised, his hands in the position recommended by the instructors, his lips parted. He would sing to himself while he drove; he was deter mined then to find humour and interest in everything. It was fatiguing.

At the same time he made some effort to draw his family together and to restore his prestige as its head. To keep us at home at week-ends he instituted a ‘family lunch’ on Sundays. We normally ate in a haphazard but satisfyingly private fashion, each person helping himself from the kitchen as from a hotel buffet. It was at one of these uncomfortable mass lunches — the last, as it turned out — that he embarrassed us by making a formal little speech.

He said: ‘It is good for all the members of a family to be together from time to time, breaking bread. I feel it strengthens the bonds of the family. The family is the unit which is at the basis of all civilization and culture. This was something I learned as a boy from the greatest of the missionaries who came to this island, to whose home, as I believe you know, I was admitted more as friend than student.’

It was bizarre, and not only because it was the first time I had heard him refer to his past. My sisters were on the point of giggling and I was fearful for my father’s sake. The mood was too high-pitched and good to last. My mother was enjoying it, though; she liked the sound of the words. She ate slowly, staring at her plate; tears came to her eyes and threatened to fall. Tears came to my father’s eyes as well. My sisters noticed and became grave.

‘There is no need to tell you, educated one and all, that life is brief and unpredictable. Here today, for example, we all sit, a complete family, each close to the other, each knowing the other well. Do you know that this might be the last time we do so? Do you know that in the years to come you might look back to this very moment and see it as one of the most important moments in your life? One growth reaches perfection and produces another. Nothing stands still. Our meal today is a type of perfection. I would like us all to be silent for a little and think about this moment.’

He was overcome by his own words. He hung his head over his plate and I could see the tears running down his cheeks. We finished our meal in miserable silence.

Afterwards he became sadly gay. It was a continuation of the same unusual mood. He said we should dress; he was going to take us out for a drive. ‘Family outing, family outing,’ he said, pretending to make a joke of it, applying to his new mood his new style of humour. My sisters and I were not excited. Cars — real ones: our mother’s father’s — were not unfamiliar to us and we didn’t care for a Sunday family outing. That was something we associated with other people: packed second-hand family cars, polished like treasure, going slowly nowhere in particular, with powdered and beribboned girls looking out at pedestrians and fighting back a smile. But there could be no denying my father. We dressed and squeezed into the car and hoped we wouldn’t be recognized. There was some trouble about getting the car to start. This gave us hope, but not for long. On my father’s instructions we all got out, my sisters, mother and myself, and ‘rocked’ the little Austin. The engine gave a kick and came confidently to life. We were relieved, though, that my father didn’t take us on the usual Sunday afternoon circuit of the city. He drove us out of the city; and then our relief was balanced by anxiety about the ability of the ticktocking little engine to take the hills which, away from the narrow coastal strip, were numerous and steep. We listened to the beat of the engine and to my father’s commentary about the areas we drove through.

We drove along narrow rough roads into the valleys of our eastern hills. We went through purely mulatto villages where the people were a baked copper colour, much disfigured by disease. They had big light eyes and kinky red hair. My father described them as Spaniards. They were a small community, exceedingly poor, separate even in slave days and now inbred to degeneracy, yet still distinguished by an almost superstitious fear and hatred of full-blooded Africans and indeed of all who were not like themselves. They permitted no Negroes to settle among them; sometimes they even stoned Negro visitors. We drove through Carib areas where the people were more Negro than Carib. Ex-slaves, fleeing the plantations, had settled here and intermarried with the very people who, in the days of slavery their great tormentors, expert trackers of forest runaways, had by this intermarriage become their depressed serfs. Now the Caribs had been absorbed and had simply ceased to be. We were not far from the city — the little shops stocked familiar goods and carried familiar advertisements — but it was like being in an area of legend. The scale was small in time, numbers and area; and here, just for a moment, the rise and fall and extinction of peoples, a concept so big and alarming, was concrete and close. Slaves and runaways, hunters and hunted, rulers and ruled: they had no romance for me. Their message was only that nothing was secure. We drove through abandoned, blighted cocoa estates and my father showed us the beauty of cocoa trees. We came out into the Indian areas, the flat lands where rice and sugarcane grew. My father spoke of the voyage, so recent but already in our strange hemisphere so remote, which the fathers and indeed some of the people we saw had made from another continent, to complete our own little bastard world.

‘O God, Pa!’ one of my sisters cried. ‘You knock that lady’s bucket out of her hand.’

He had. The woman was at the roadside standpipe, bucketless, a picture of shock and amazement. My father looked back to see. And at that moment I saw a cyclist, leaning on his bike and chatting on the verge, suddenly, with the briskness of a character in an animated cartoon, twist the handle of his cycle out of the path of the Austin.

‘O God, Pa! Look where you going.’

It was the irritation in my sister’s voice which annoyed my father, the irritation which broke into his own high-pitched mood and mocked it. He fell silent, and in silence we drove on for some time. He began to mutter to himself and to bite his lower lip. He always overacted, even when his emotions were genuine.

The winding road straightened out on an embankment lined at the foot of each steep slope with poui trees. The sight of the straight empty road seemed to decide my father.

‘Bitches!’ he said, taking his hands off the steering wheel and accelerating.

We shot across the road and rolled swiftly down the embankment. A split second separated this abrupt deviation from my sisters’ screams. We rolled swiftly — but to me it was all in slow motion — towards the trunks of the poui trees. The baby Austin model had its points, though. We went straight between the tree trunks without touching. A series of soft grassy bumps, and the car came to rest, slightly on its side. The engine cut out and there was silence until my sisters remembered to scream again. Abandoning modesty, they scrambled out of the car as fast as they could and climbed up to the road, getting such purchase as they could out of grass and weeds. They said they had no intention of driving back to the city with my father; they would walk until they found a bus or a taxi. My mother called them back, not to make them change their minds, but to give them money for the journey. Her manner indicated that it was her own duty to stay with the Austin, come what might.

It didn’t take much to right the Austin. And presently we were pulled out by a passing lorry, with whose driver and driver’s family — all brilliantly dressed, all in the cab: their Sunday afternoon outing as well — my father exchanged the lightest of banter. We picked up my sisters. They had already begun to wilt a little and scarcely needed to be persuaded; they also welcomed the opportunity to abuse my father. My father ignored them; he sang all the way back. But as soon as we were home he became morose. His face was drawn; the pouches under his eyes went dark; and the unusual mood of the day now showed itself to have been a type of hysteria. He locked himself in his room, answered none of my mother’s calls, and didn’t come out even to have a cup of tea.

So our first and last Sunday family outing ended; and so our Sunday lunches ended as well. My father withdrew once more. The baby Austin ceased to be comic and became to us a symbol of indefinable terror. We were happier when it was garaged with some defect. Since then, I might add here, I have looked upon the little-man type in his little car with feelings which, to say the least, are mixed. My sisters and I began spending our week-ends freely again with my mother’s family. The suspicion came to me that between Cecil and one of my sisters there existed an incestuous relationship. I had nothing to go by, but with these things one just suddenly knows.

I was walking home from school one rainy afternoon. They were laying cables and the roads were dug up. The bright red clay ran like paint in the gutters. Here and there on the pavement were enormous cable bobbins. The cables were dusted with a white powder and looked like mass-manufactured pastry, a type of strudel, produced in enormous lengths and conveyed in this way — on the bobbins, pushed through the streets by straining barebacked men — to the retailers, who would chop it into small pieces. I heard a fresh shower of rain coming and I began to run. At a corner, as though he had been there a long time, expecting me, was my father. He was sitting on his bicycle with one foot on the pavement; the Austin was in some mechanic’s garage.

‘Hop on,’ he said. ‘I think we can take a chance.’

To me towing on bicycles was one of the deep, tempting illegalities. It ranked with cycling at night without a light or riding an unlicensed bicycle; it ranked, in illegality if not yet in temptation, with driving an uninsured motorcar or driving without a permit. It astonished me that my father, a government servant, should choose on a main road so openly to break the law. But his arm was outstretched in invitation, and it was raining.

I sat on the crossbar. I felt the awkwardness of my protruding limbs and the burden of my weight. His arms imprisoned me. We went off shakily. I could hear his tremulous breathing and was aware of the difficulty of every manœuvre on the muddy, slippery asphalt. I concentrated on the road. The rain was heavy and stinging; we were soon both soaked. People sheltering under the eaves of shops — as still and as meditative as people in the tropics appear when they shelter from a downpour — stared at us. We didn’t take shelter ourselves. We didn’t say a word to one another. We went on, concentrating on the road and its difficulties. The gutters were full and racing. We sank some inches in water once when the flooded road dipped without warning. We slipped and had little skids. But no accident befell us. When we got home my hair was dripping, my nose was dripping, my books were a pulpy mess, and my shirt was ticklingly stuck in patches to my chest and back. My father’s suit was ruined. But still we said nothing; and in silence we separated, to dry ourselves.

I wonder if I would have said anything, if I would have made some statement of gratitude or sympathy, if I had known that that was to be our last contact, that afterwards we were both to follow our separate destinies and that mine, for all my unwillingness, was to be linked to his.

My mother had a theory about the lower classes. She needed one because on our street we were surrounded by them. Apart from one or two very rich areas and three or four very poor areas, all our city was like this, with the slum shack in the unfenced lot next to the two-storeyed mansion. The system or lack of system had its points. Since for most of us there was nothing like a good address or a bad address, everyone submitted to an individual assessment, and this was invariably fair. Everyone received his due and there was harmony. My mother’s theory was that the lower classes respected only those who respected themselves. She used to tell the story of a middle-aged white woman who had lived on the street for years, respected by all; but had then so enraged the lower classes by briefly taking one of their number as a lover that she had had to move. Her house was stoned and broken into; when she walked down the street she was insulted by the very people who before would have been delighted to help with the garden or with a heavy box or suitcase. And now, without warning, we found ourselves in the position of that woman. We were not stoned or abused. But we fell definitely into the category of those who had ceased to respect themselves.

Not long after that cycle ride through the rain, my father failed to return home one afternoon. We kept the news to ourselves. The next day he wasn’t at the Education Department. We continued to keep the news to ourselves. It was only at the end of the week that we discovered that what was unknown to us and had become our secret was known to a large section of the island. We were waiting anxiously at home; we went out and found we had become notorious. It was like that. We went out and found that my father, so far from disappearing quietly, had become a figure of sorts. He was in the hills, a preacher, a leader, with a growing frenzied following.

We read about people leaving their homes ‘one day’. This is the fact, and beyond this we can seldom go. The literal side of my mind has tried a hundred times to work out satisfactorily the events of that day and that week; and a hundred times I am left with the facts minutely established, and their mystery. My father obviously intended to return home when he left for the Education Department that morning. Some of the department files he had brought home were on his desk; his clothes were in the wardrobe; his bankbook was in his drawer. What happened? A fit at the office, a rage, a storming out of the building? Or was it in a lower key? Did he leave the Austin behind because he thought of the city centre, and remembered the traffic congestion there? He was unbalanced, in a temper; he walked. He walked to the city centre, to Waterloo Square. He found himself among the idle and the unemployed. He found himself among the striking dockworkers. They talked among themselves. He broke in and told his own story. He told of his early life, of the missionary and his lady and the aboriginal young man in a clearing in the forest. He told of the years of darkness that followed his abandonment. He told of his marriage and his service with the government. He had never spoken of these things before; he held his audience. He told these men as despairing as himself of his decision, perhaps made even as he was speaking, to turn his back on this darkness. He was aware of his audience: the sons of slaves. Once, he told them, after the abolition of slavery, the ex-slaves had abandoned the foreign city and withdrawn to the forests to rediscover glory and a way of looking at the world. They were not afraid — fear lay not in the forests but in the regulated city and plantations — and these men had survived. Couldn’t the same be done again? His speech would have improved as he spoke. He saw, and his words were vivid. Then they started walking in procession. They went past the docks, where daily for a week there had been scuffles between the locked-out dockers and the equally depressed Volunteers’ who had replaced them. And the procession, taking both dockers and volunteers along with it, had left the area around the dock-gates deserted except for policemen, and in peace. Success is success; once it occurs it explains itself. On the march to the hills food and shelter must have been provided by the poor. Every morning the numbers increased. Witness my father, then, at the end of the week, camping with his followers on crown lands, ‘the forests of glory’, proclaiming the withdrawal of his flock and asking only that they be left alone.

It was an eccentric lower-class movement, and there were always eccentric movements among the lower classes. On any Sunday in our city you could have found twenty bizarre processions all dedicated to God and glory. In that first week the newspapers spoke only of the silence on the docks. They ignored the beginnings of a movement about which monographs have since been published by the universities of Porto Rico and Jamaica. The monographs tell accurately enough of the rise and withering-away of the movement; they describe its occasionally frightening ritual. But like so many sociological studies, they leave the mystery as mystery; they explain nothing. Twenty people say a thing and they are twenty madmen. But the twenty-first comes along, and he is a hero, a chieftain, a saint. A quality in the man, or a quality of the time? The message, or the fine tuning of responsive despair? A dock strike was being cruelly broken. Who ever believes in the totality of his defeat? Who, seeing this defeat coming and unable to comprehend its horror, does not believe he will in some way be protected or revenged? Today we can see this exodus from our city as a small part of the unrest in the colonies and poorer territories of the Americas just before the war. Each territory produced its own symptoms of disease, its own fantastic growths. We lived with disease; we had ceased to notice. Every day, if you looked, you could find some crazed preacher under a shop awning singing with his little band of the destruction to come. I see these religious excesses, still an aspect of the tourist quaintness of the islands, as an attempt to deny the general shipwreck. Movements like my father’s — without that purpose which might have turned them into true revolutions — expressed despair but were at the same time positive. They generated anger in people who thought they were too dispirited even for that; they generated comradeship. Above all, they generated disorder where previously everyone had deluded himself there was order. Disorder was drama, and drama was discovered to be a necessary human nutriment.

The general historical trend can be explained now. But my literal mind goes back to that first day, to the leaving of the Education Department, the decision not to drive but to walk. It goes back to that moment in the square when my father broke into the conversation of the striking dock-workers; that moment when he judged that the time had come to leave the square, and people followed him out. It goes back to the mystery of the widow of the transport contractor who saw in my father a deep distress and sincerity and, from that first day, offered him her devotion. To her he was the man attempting to live the good life as laid down by his Aryan ancestors. He had ceased to be a householder and man of affairs; she saw him entering the stage of meditation before the final renunciation. It was an idea he received from her and exploited; it was an idea which in its essence he lived out with her. I always saw method in my father’s madness.

I believe that when he left the Education Department — it might have been after an argument about a minute or a decision to appoint a schools inspector or even after a rebuke from an ‘enemy’ for having his hair cut in office hours — I believe he had in mind something like a repeat of the bottle-breaking incident, whose triumph had remained with him. But he had gone to the square and fallen in with strikers; a widow, resting her feet after shopping, had seen virtue in him. Ideas had been given him; he had begun to talk. He lost control of himself and events; even at the beginning, I feel, his movement ran ahead of him. What the missionary’s lady had seen in him, the aboriginal young man in the high collar, fighting his way up and out of poverty and darkness, was at last about to be fulfilled. The chance had come; he could swear he had not looked for it. It was now or never, and he must have known this. He must have summoned up all his original gifts. But now there was the transport contractor’s widow, with her especial piety; and the irony of my father’s long-prophesied success was that it came to him as a Hindu. It was the Hindu mendicant’s robe that he wore in the hills; and for all the emblems and phrases of Christianity that he used, it was a type of Hinduism that he expounded, a mixture of acceptance and revolt, despair and action, a mixture of the mad and the logical. He offered something to many people; but it was his example and his presence rather than his teaching which mattered. His movement spread like fire. Fire was the word. Sugarcane fields burned in his path. Calm in the hills, he offered disorder and drama. And at last the newspapers noticed.

I cannot say that the island was alarmed. We — if for the moment I can detach myself from so intimate a phenomenon — were if anything excited. On Isabella we were starved of large events and we secretly longed for the riots and burnings to continue. We felt we had at last caught up with the other disturbed territories in the region; we were flattered by the hints, now beginning to be thrown out, that we too were ripe for a Royal Commission. But for us who were of the family of Gurudeva — that was the name my father now took — the matter, as might be imagined, was somewhat different. My sisters were especially distressed; style and fashion cannot come easily to the daughters of someone regarded as a lunatic of the commonest sort. In the early days the movement drew most of its support from the three or four very poor areas I have mentioned. There was as yet little publicity, and nothing to suggest that the lunatic was beginning to be seen by some as a great worker’s leader, a successor to the revered Deschampsneufs.

The first reports that came to the street suggested only that a family which had for years been treated with respect had suddenly thrown up a type of street-corner preacher. Street-corner preachers had their place and enjoyed their own respect. But the lower classes looked for such people among themselves, and just as, out of that immorality which they accepted as a condition of their own existence, they abused the respectable who lapsed, so now they mocked us. They were tirelessly and grotesquely familiar. My sisters left the house and went to live with my mother’s family. The street was pleased; they had ‘driven out’ someone else; tradition had been maintained. My mother and I continued to live in the house. We were left more or less in peace, until my father’s new reputation, as a leader of the poor, made itself felt. Then we received more than respect; we were handled with a mixture of awe, reverence and familiarity, which was a degree more disquieting than simple hostility.

But my real troubles were at school. I had sought to suppress my father and the life of my family. Now, like Hok years before, I was betrayed; for me school could no longer be a private hemisphere. Our traditions at Isabella Imperial were brutal. Neither masters nor students in those days worried about wounding anyone’s racial or political susceptibilities; the curious result was that almost no one was offended. A Negro boy with an extravagantly jutting head could, for instance, be Mango to everyone. So now I became Guru. Major Grant gave the name and popularized it. He taught us Latin and wore a monocle, partly I believe as a comic prop; he was a great manufacturer of names. I had learned that the only way to handle the Major was to be brutal in return. So now the double act was forced on me of dissociating myself from my father at the same time as I stuck up for him.

An old joke of Major Grant’s was that a boy who did badly at school could either join the staff of one of our newspapers — if he had failed English, that is — or join the staff of the City Council and ever after ride through the streets in glory on his own blue rubbish-cart. For Browne, the singer, Major Grant had predicted not the Isabella Inquirer — Browne’s English was all right and this automatically disqualified him — but the blue rubbish-cart. He accordingly called Browne Blue-cart Browne, and this over the years had been shortened to Blue.

Browne came to school late one morning.

‘Late this morning, Blue? Been making the rounds as usual?’

‘As usual,’ Browne said. ‘There was a lot of trash on Rupert Street.’

A defeat for the Major: he lived in Rupert Street. He tried to rally. ‘Well, I am glad we are not all on strike.’ He got no response. He didn’t wait; he went on, just teaching now. ‘A thing which many people don’t know is that it was our friends the Ro-mans who invented the strike.’ It was his way of talking, laying stresses on words he considered important or funny, pronouncing them in what he considered a funny or foreign way, turning t and r into Spanish-sounding consonants. ‘The first strike took place in 494 B.C.’ He got up and wrote the date on the blackboard. ‘494 B.C. 259 A.U.C. And what, you may ask, is A.U.C.? And I will tell you, sir. Ab urbe condita.’ He spat out the the Latin, making it almost a single word. ‘And they called their strike a secessio.’ He wrote the word out, underlined the dates he had written, added in English first strike, and went back to his desk. ‘Strikes were not invented, as some of us have begun to believe, by Gu-ru-de-va.’

He got his laughs and stared mischievously at me. A desk lid banged hard, twice. It was like a warning. It came from Browne. I wasn’t looking for support there, I must say. Major Grant himself was taken aback. He was a harmless old soul whose jokes, by their fewness and badness, had become jokes, known to generations of Isabella Imperial boys. For the rest of the lesson he tried to pacify Browne. He addressed him gently and often as Blue and for stretches appeared to be talking to him alone.

‘Caeruleus. When you see the word don’t all reach for your grubby little pens and scratch “sea-blue”.’ He spoke the last word in falsetto, and continued in falsetto. ‘Thaeruleuth. It’h thea-blue, mummy. Rubbish, sir! Caeruleus simply means sea-colour. It might be blue, it might be brown, it might be green. It might even, Blue, be black.’ He stopped abruptly, horrified at the unexpected twist of his words.

Amid the laughter Browne’s desk lid banged again. He rose and walked out of the classroom without a word. Major Grant went red. He fitted his monocle carefully into his eye and looked down at his Vergil.

It was then that I saw that what I had thought of as my betrayal was no longer a betrayal. School had ceased to be a private hemisphere. The outside world, which we had denied for so long, had begun to invade it; and after Browne’s widely reported gesture there was no need for me to fear ridicule. To many I became what I already was on our street: the son of the leader suddenly found. But I continued, as they say, to play both sides. With some boys I was as detached as before about my father’s movement, though their criticism still pained me. And then I could not reject the conspiratorial devotion of the others. With them I was conspiratorial myself and behaved as though I knew of even greater things to come. For a time it did seem that greater things might be coming. The newspapers spoke about police reinforcements being ‘rushed’ to the hills; and there was a photograph of the Police Commissioner, pistol in hand, leading his apprehensive-looking men in a search of some building. It was strange how drama overtook certain areas, to which no one would have attributed romance or the possibility of adventure, and transformed them, so that even their names acquired a different flavour. Policemen watched our house; the fact was reported in the newspapers; I became a minor figure of drama myself.

It wearied and nauseated me, to tell the truth: the foolish drama, the foolish devotion so many offered me. If I try concretely to describe my reaction to what had overtaken our family — and at times, in lightheaded moods of withdrawal and shock, it was possible as after an accident to see the whole horror afresh, to compare past with present — I would say that the episode gave me a sensation of rawness and violation. It was as though I was chewing rubbery raw flesh and being made to swallow tainted oil. I had made my decision to abandon Isabella, to eschew my shipwreck on the tropical desert island. But the island had been the island of The Black Swan, the fresh green island sighted at dawn, to music Now it felt corrupted and corrupting. It was this corruption which I now wished to flee. I wished to make a fresh start in my own element; to rid myself of those relationships which it had solaced me to think of as temporary and unimportant, but which I now felt to be tainting.

Yet time, our life, passes. We cannot keep ourselves back for some tract of life ahead. We are made by everything, by action, by withdrawal; and those relationships, begun in corruption, which I thought I could shrug off when the time came, turned out in the end to be able to imprison. They grew on me; I did not look for them. But my failure was my silence. I was silent, to give just one example, in the geography class. It was a drowsy afternoon class. The master was reading from a dull book about the manufacture of sugar. At the beginning of the year, he read out, the ripened canes were cut. He had come to the end of a sentence; he sighed and added, still reading from the book, but it was like a personal interjection, that the cutters were paid by the root. ‘Paid? Less than a cent a root!’ It was Browne who had spoken. His voice was loud and precise; it silenced the drone and mutter of the master, who continued to look down at his book. In the silence many of the boys looked at me, as though I was campaigning for an increase in cutters’ pay. The true embarrassment, I could see, was my presence in the class. I stared into space, giving away nothing. It was hideous and diminishing, this devotion, this assumption that I was one of them. I felt threatened. My chieftaincy lay elsewhere. But I was silent.

A movement like my father’s could not endure. It was, as I have said, no more than a gesture of mass protest, a statement of despair, without a philosophy or cause. And the administration remained calm. A rash governor might have attempted to evict my father and his followers from their camp on crown lands; and then there might have been bloodshed and bitterness. As it was, certain necessary precautions were taken to prevent looting and arson in surrounding areas; the camp was guarded without being in any way harassed; and the frenzy was allowed to subside. Some acres of forest reserve were burned and some half-hearted planting of crops occurred. But the forests of glory did not yield food in four weeks or six weeks. People wearied of taking offerings to the camp and getting little in return; they wearied of idleness and the absence of drama. A drift began back to the city. It became marked when the dock strike was settled and the Volunteers’ were withdrawn. The union thus established plagued us ever after.

The camp in the hills became another fact of our island life. For two or three days at a time the newspapers made no reference to it. At school we — if I might detach myself once more — gave it up as a source of drama. It was frustrating both to those who had hoped for some vague social upheaval and to those, like Deschampsneufs, who relished the excitement. But we were not surprised. We accepted that on Isabella we were a people of mainly domestic interests, incapable of supporting large events. Our attention turned rapidly to other things. It turned, more characteristically, to a slogan competition.

The slogan was for a brand of rum. The first prize was the unheard-of sum of five thousand dollars, and the winner was to be announced soon. Cecil had been ceaselessly inventive. Thousands and thousands of the coloured entry forms had been showered on the city and our towns and villages — you could see the pink, blue or green forms even in the gutters — but Cecil was convinced that the prize was going to be his. He said, impressively, that he ‘needed’ the money: The name of the rum was Isabella Rum and Cecil’s final prize-winning slogan, which he publicized as soon as he had sent it in, hoping no doubt to reduce the rest of us to despair, was At my parties I fly high with Isabella. We had all assumed that a reference to parties was the ‘trick’ requirement of the slogan judges: the drawing on the entry form was of a party scene in a country of the North. I now believe the drawing to have been an imported multi-purpose block. It could have been used to advertise a dance or dancing school, a gala night at a restaurant or hotel, a tailoring establishment. But in all our slogans we assumed the role of metropolitan party-givers. We did so easily; at Isabella Imperial we were natural impersonators.

The slogan excitement, alas, ended as limply as many of our other excitements. The result dismayed the school. Many secret slogan-coiners came out into the open and were as noisy as Cecil had been. We didn’t think the judging had been fair. For one thing the result came too soon after the closing date of the competition. And we didn’t think much of the winning slogan. It was Don’t thank me, thank Isabella. The drawing that went with it showed a man in evening garb of some sort showing his guests to the door on a night which, to go by the furs of the tall ladies, was wintry. He was speaking the words to his guests; and in a further balloon, attached to his head by a line of diminishing circles, to indicate unspoken thought, were the words ‘Is a rum, Isabella!’ For a week or so the newspapers carried the photograph of the very happy slogan-deviser. He was an old Negro labourer, one of those who worked on his own plot of chives or on a citrus plantation. He sat on a bentwood chair in front of his weather-beaten shack; before him was a table with bottles of Isabella Rum and tumblers on an embroidered tablecloth.

‘I am not going to touch Isabella Rum from now on,’ Cecil said. ‘Let them drink their own rum. “Is a rum, Isabella.” I don’t call that a slogan.’

Deschampsneufs said, ‘I don’t know why you people worried your heads so much for. Of course they had to give it to a black man. And a black working man.’ He had been sending in slogans like everyone else and was a little peeved.

‘Eh,’ Eden said. ‘I don’t see why for you grudge a poor black man. After all is they who does drink the blasted thing.’

‘Me grudge. Is for you to grudge. Wait. You will see where you getting this poor and this black from. Poor black man! You call that a slogan? They call it a competition. But look at the prize-winners. They pick one in this part, one in that part, and they mix up the races to keep everybody sweet. And all of all-you was busting your educated brains. That is what is happening in this island. Wait. Just now they will have foolish black men like that one running the place. Not because they brilliant and so on, but because they foolish and they black. You just wait for this Royal Commission.’

‘And a damn good thing too,’ Eden said.

‘You know, Eden,’ Deschampsneufs said reflectively, ‘the one thing I can’t understand is why you didn’t win this competition. You didn’t have to send in a slogan. All you had to do was to send in a photo. In Technicolor.’

Eden was something of a buffoon. He was the blackest boy in the school and for some time was known as Spite because some boys said he was black for spite. His reputation as a buffoon and his special relationship with Deschampsneufs had been established early at Isabella Imperial. In a third-form science class one day the master held up a simple device and asked whether we knew what it was for. It looked like a two-pronged fork with a shiny handle; both prongs were hinged to a wooden or metal base. It might have been a switch, of the sort scientists ‘threw’ in films. Deschampsneufs, sitting next to Eden, whispered, ‘It generates electricity.’ Eden whipped his fingers at the master, demanding to answer. ‘Hush!’ the master said. ‘We are getting news from Adam. Yes, Eden?’ ‘It generates electricity, sir.’ The master went wild. He threw the device on the floor. Then he took up everything within reach on the long lab bench and let it fall. ‘Let’s drop it. This and this and this and this. Let’s drop everything.’ He dropped two or three light bulbs; he was like a man suddenly indifferent to his personal safety. ‘It generates electricity, sir. You get this to generate electricity, Eden, and I will give you my salary for the month. For the month? I’ll give you my salary for the rest of the year. For the rest of my life. I will give you my pension. I will work for you in the evenings. I will send my children to an orphanage and divorce my wife.’ So it had gone on, the agitated red man railing at the placid black boy, until glass shattered on the floor — a test tube or a light bulb; and as it shattered, the master bellowed: ‘I will work for you in your garden.’ He had saved it for last, not only the familiar pun on Eden’s name, but his statement, white man to black boy, of what he considered Eden’s true role, that of garden-boy or yard-boy. It was cruel; it went too near the truth; Eden’s background was of the simplest. Our traditions were brutal; but now we all went still. Deschampsneufs stared down frowning at his crossed arms, like someone sharing the abuse.

Later, when the incident had become a joke, Deschampsneufs claimed that he knew what the device was and had deliberately misled Eden. I don’t believe he knew, though. I believe he was genuinely using or misusing a word he had just acquired; and I believe his shock, at his error and the abuse that followed it, was as great as ours. But this became their relationship: Deschampsneufs the comic, Eden his willing straight man.

We were talking one day about marriage and the absurdity of the institution that would turn all the foolish boys we knew into husbands, lords and masters to girls who, poor things, could not at that moment guess their maturing fate. We went on to talk about selective breeding. Deschampsneufs laid down the restrictions he would apply. On this subject he was allowed a certain authority. It was known that in the slave days the Deschampsneufs had kept a slave stud-farm on one of the islets off Isabella; the Negroes there were said to be a super-race still. Eden, attempting to clown and perhaps also looking for a tribute to his own superb physique, said, ‘Champ, you would let me breed?’ Deschampsneufs considered him. ‘It would be a pity to let the strain die out,’ he said. ‘Yes, Spite. I think we will let you breed. But we will have to cross you with a damn intelligent woman.’

Much was forgiven Deschampsneufs because from the security of his aristocracy he mixed easily with the poorest and crudest boys; in this he was unlike the son of the English clergyman who, possessing only piety, didn’t acknowledge black boys in the street, and thereby made himself ridiculous. A lot more was forgiven Deschampsneufs because he was witty and inventive. He loved, for instance, to put a price on a boy; but only he could have got away with it. Only he would have been allowed to say, of a boy he didn’t like, ‘He wouldn’t fetch five dollars.’ Outrageousness of this sort was required of him.

‘All you had to do,’ he now said to Eden, ‘was to send in your photo. In Technicolor.’

But he didn’t get his laugh. The moment was wrong. His tone was wrong; it was touched with a genuine bitterness. Browne didn’t like it. Eden, taking his cue from Browne, didn’t like it either. If they were younger they might have come to blows. Eden would have dumbly done what the new mood required of him. But not even angry words passed between them then. The teacher arrived; everyone went to his desk. The declaration of war was left unmade. In this new stage of the old war between master and slave it was left to me to have the fight with Deschampsneufs, a fight I never looked for. I had my own fantasies. I had made my decision to leave. It was horrible to me to be identified with those who struggled outside the gates of the Cercle Sportif.

My father’s movement faded. Even in our house he faded. He had become a remote public personality, the possession of everyone; he was, occasionally, a name in the newspapers. I found I no longer tried to visualize his day concretely. Such private concern seemed unreal. At school there was no more talk of Gurudeva or riots or burnings; we all preferred, for various reasons, to forget that frustration. The injustices of the slogan competition had also been forgotten. We had a new excitement: the Christmas meeting of the Isabella Turf Club. The Inquirer told us every day that racing was the sport of kings; and just as there were depressed boys who were prepared to talk endlessly with Cecil about models of motorcars they could never hope to drive, so now there were boys, in the Isabellan scale no higher than grooms, who talked endlessly about the sport of kings. They knew the names of horses, jockeys and trainers; they knew about pedigrees, past performances and handicaps. I couldn’t believe in their interest myself. I hated racing; I hated the gambling that went with it. But even I was forced to learn a little.

The main race of the Christmas meeting was the Malay Cup. The Inquirer annually told the story of this cup. It had been given to the Turf Club at the turn of the century by the governor, Sir Hugh Clifford. Though it was on Isabella that Sir Hugh exercised his first colonial governorship, he regarded all his service in the Caribbean, in Isabella and elsewhere, as exile from Malaya, to which he was devoted; and he spent much of his time in Government House writing a book of Malayan memories called Coast and Kampong which, after an unfavourable review by Joseph Conrad, committed him to the further literary exercise of a lengthy correspondence, ripening to friendship, with the as yet little known novelist. The Malay Cup was Sir Hugh’s parting gift to the island he had liked less than literature.

The favourite for the Malay Cup that year was a horse called Tamango. It belonged to the Deschampsneufs stables. Tamango was popular at school as well, for special reasons. Many boys claimed Deschampsneufs as a friend and therefore claimed a special interest in his horse. Then the name was African; and though the significance of the name was known to be ambiguous, the Negro boys were pleased. At Isabella Imperial we all knew where the name came from. Some people outside didn’t know — so much we could gather from the sports pages, already notorious to us from the howlers Major Grant regularly culled from them; and this private knowledge made us more proprietorial. Tamango, in a simplified and abbreviated edition, was one of the French texts we used in the lower forms; we all knew that Mérimée story of the African chief, seller of slaves, himself treacherously enslaved, and finally a leader of revolt. It was typical of the coolness and ambiguity of the Deschampsneufs family to give such a name to a horse: they seemed constantly anxious to call attention to a past which they agreed had been disreputable.

The interest in his family’s horse made Deschampsneufs insufferable at school. He came in in the morning smelling of horse, with his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers wet and dirty and stuck with bits of grass. He looked harassed, as though he had been up all night, a man with worries which the frivolous sporting world, mere watchers and gamblers, taking pleasure for granted, could never know or appreciate. He permitted himself no levity throughout the day, and as soon as the last lesson was over he was off again. His manner invited anxious questioning. But all inquiry or interest made him impatient and rude. He was especially brutal with those boys who, partly to please him, pretended to know more about horses than they did.

Then the horse called Tamango disappeared.

The reaction at school was strange. The correct thing to say was of course that it was a pity or, if you wished to use a newspaper word, an outrage. But there were undercurrents. It was at once assumed that the horse would not be found; and it was also assumed that Deschampsneufs had in some way become vulnerable to further loss. His loss was tragic, but it made him ridiculous; and within two days the loss itself became something that could be justified. Boys who had put up with Deschampsneufs’s brutality became retrospectively irritated; the merit of the horse was questioned; and the very name Tamango, to so many a cause for pride, was now seen as a provocation and an insult.

After about a week we heard that the horse had been found. It was dead. That was all we heard at first, and the news surprised no one. But what I next heard chilled and sickened me and gave me more strongly than ever the sensation of rawness and violation: rubbery raw flesh, tainted holy oil. It was more than a death. A charcoal burner had found the animal, garlanded with marigold and faded hibiscus, on a freshly prepared platform of beaten and plastered earth. Heart and entrails had been torn out; but there were flowers on the animal’s mane, flowers woven into its tail; and the coat had been brushed as though by proud grooms. At the centre of the platform, on a smaller, shallow platform of its own, were the remains of a fire, still fragrant with burnt sugar, pitchpine, butter and coconut. Banana suckers had been planted at each corner of this smaller platform; and at each corner a swastika had been traced out in flour. Asvamedha: to myself alone I spoke the word. It filled me with unexpected awe and horror. An ancient sacrifice, in my imagination a thing of beauty, speaking of the youth of the world, of untrodden forests and unsullied streams, of horses and warrior-youths in morning light: now rendered obscene. My mind, at once literal and fantastic, created a picture of a deepening, endless tunnel: into this I felt I was ever descending, when all I wanted was to return to the light.

The killing of Tamango was inevitably linked with my father and his followers. The newspapers were outraged and called for action. But nothing could be established. The newspapers called for the destruction of my father’s camp and his eviction from crown lands. The administration ignored this unbalanced and ill-timed advice; the governor continued to be cool. At school it was hard for me, though. I was at one with those who abused me. Their abuse was touched with fascination, but their sense of sacrilege was not greater than my own. I could not ridicule; I could not defend. I was sorry for Deschampsneufs’s sake: the vindictive current still ran against him. I shared his anger, hurt and disgust. But when he challenged me to fight I fought.

I had never had a fight before and I was certain it would go against me. We were about the same height but Deschampsneufs was heavier. I thought that whatever I was going to do had better be done quickly; and I was as surprised as anyone when at the end of our first clinching I found that Deschampsneufs was on the floor and I was on top of him. That, I knew, was the limit of my success; through our unscientific tangling of arms and legs I could sense that he was recovering fast. I had a moment of alarm, and for an added reason. At the back of my mind was the thought that I had supporters. Now I saw that the battle was mine alone. And the defeated were always wrong. But our form-master was on the alert for just such a fight; the silence, unusual in a free period, warned him. He came and separated us. I was relieved. The boys who had offered me devotion before became more devoted now, they who were willing for me to have been alone.

In the history books, as I say, my father’s movement is now made to appear just another part of a recognizable pattern of events in one region of the world. The mood is seen to have created both the leader and the special event associated with him. That event was not the exodus from the city, the march away from the troubled docks of both strikers and volunteers. It was the killing of Tamango, That was the movement’s most famous deed, as central to it as the racecourse suicide was to the suffragette movement in England, They are both events which, becoming history, lose their horror and obscenity and appear the natural, almost logical, expression of a mood; they are events which now seem oddly expected and dramatically right. In Jamaica, the regional history books now say, dealing with the disturbed prewar period, there were strikes and riots; in Trinidad there was an oilfield strike during which three people were shot dead and a policeman was burned alive; in Isabella they killed a racehorse belonging to an old French family.

So the deed becomes a crystallization of an existing mood. But my memory of those days tells me that the deed in such a situation is necessary; that without it a mood is useless and burns itself out. After this deed our island changed, though change was not to show for fifteen years. It was like the loaders’ insulting of Cecil’s father, the gesture which suddenly reveals society as an association of consent and teaches, dangerously for the future of all, that consent can be withdrawn. And I go back to the leader and the deed. The leader intuits the necessary deed. The killing of a racehorse, a favourite for the Malay Cup, was outrageous and obscene to everyone on that sport-crazed island. Yet it became an acceptable rallying point of righteous, underground emotion. The successful leader works by intuition; such is the degree of self-violation he imposes on his followers, whom he must never cease to surprise.

But for me there was something more. Primitive, bestial, degraded: these were some of the words used by certain sections of the island. I shared their horror, but I had my own reasons. Asvamedha. I had read the texts, I knew the word. The horse-sacrifice, the Aryan ritual of victory and overlordship, a statement of power so daring it was risked only by the truly brave; purified by the tender Asoka; revived by those who came after; and performed, memorably, by the grandson of the general of the last Maurya to celebrate the expulsion of the Greeks from Aryavarta, the Aryan land. How had my father arrived at it? Was it simply the intuition of the leader? Was the act no more than what it was, accompanied by simple Hindu ritual which anyone might have observed and copied? Or was it an attempt at the awesome sacrifice, the challenge to Nemesis, performed by a shipwrecked man on a desert island? Asvamedha. Tainted oil, raw flesh. Chieftaincy among mountains and snow had been my innermost fantasy. Now, deeply, I felt betrayed and ridiculed. I rejected the devotion that was offered me. I wished to fly, to begin afresh, lucidly.

4

I WAS relieved when the war came and my father was interned under some wartime regulation. In this internment he was fortunate. He disappeared almost as soon as he had made his mark. He left behind a reputation which memory could heighten; he was spared the slow neglect, leading to derision, which would certainly have come. With the war, with the arrival of the Americans in Isabella, the building of bases, with the money and prosperity and the urgency it created, with that new sense of nearness to great events, my father’s movement would have died of its own futility. When he was released after the war he was no longer required. He was like a man who had been dead six years. This suited him. He wished to be alone; and after a week or so of mainly newspaper fuss he was allowed to live in quiet retirement. But he bequeathed me certain relationships.

With Deschampsneufs, in the first place. We had never been close. I remembered him on the beach pulling in the seine with the three corpses; I had tried then, for a reason I could never give, to hide from him. At Isabella Imperial there had not been anything like the belching competitions we used to have in our earlier school; the invitation to see his vine and Meccano set had not been repeated and possibly now lived in my memory alone. Our fight had only been an untidy scramble in a cleared space between desks; all I remembered of it was a confusion of limbs, the look of surprise on Deschampsneufs’s face when he found himself on his back, and the dustiness of the oiled floor. But the cliché occurred: we were more friendly afterwards. He became less flippant with me. He told me some of his secrets. He too wished to leave Isabella. He intended to go to Quebec and paint. That he painted was news to me. He said he thought it was an interest which would be considered effeminate in Isabella; in Quebec, which was French and marvellous, they would understand. He also wished to get married, the sooner the better; he wanted to have ten children, so that he could ‘sit down and watch those buggers eat’. I suspected this ambition: I heard the words coming from an older and more foolish person, some harassed poor relation at a Sunday lunch. I entered Deschampsneufs’s world tremulously. I was not interested and I did not wish to offend. I felt I had little to offer in return. After all that had happened, his friendship embarrassed me; or perhaps I was embarrassed by what, on Isabella, his offering of friendship implied.

Browne offered me friendship of a different sort. He too had his secrets. His past as a clown and singer of coon songs tormented him, and he used me as his confessor. But I could not wash him clean. I remembered his great success too well. I remembered his delight — the delight of the dancing boy in a toy suit with a bowtie and straw hat and cane and painted red lips — and I remembered his parents’ delight, and my envy of his fame.

I like cake, I like honey,

I am not the boy to refuse any money.

I can sleep on a cotton bale

Or roost up a tree.

Tell you what it is, boys:

Nothing hurts me.

He blamed his parents — I remembered his father, in a heavy brown suit, leaning forward in his folding chair, and giving his cackling, squelchy, feminine Negro laugh, like a man about to spit — but he ought to have blamed our innocence. I wasn’t sure what Browne required of me. Did he require my sympathy and anger? He insisted on the past and humiliation, but he appeared oddly indifferent to my response. And I didn’t know what to say. Sympathy wasn’t what I felt. It was more the nausea that came to me when I thought of what had overtaken our family. And just as I entered Deschampsneufs’s privacy unwillingly, so I feared to hear more of Browne’s interior life. It was not my past. It was not my personality. I lacked the equipment the Brownes carried, that innocence which, with the side of himself he now presented to me, he was trying to suppress.

I would look at our eastern hills, inescapable from the city, and I would imagine them the object of the gaze of those thousands who, from their fields, could look forward to nothing but servitude and days in the sun. But this had to be stopped! This was not the way I wished to look at the island during the time on it that remained to me. I grew to fear Browne’s fellowship. I grew to hate the very hills. It might have been the raw nerves of adolescence. How easily we forget the messiness of that process! There were days at this time when the sight of an automobile accident would make me want to fast out of sympathy for those who had suffered. And now through Browne I saw distress everywhere. See how I deal in paradoxes. See how, though rejecting my father’s movement, I began to be contaminated by the attitudes he released in his followers.

Withdrawal: it became urgent now for me. Before it had been part of fantasy, part of the urge to escape shipwreck and to return to lands I had fashioned in my imagination, lands of horsemen, high plains, mountains and snow; and time had been as unreal as place. Now I felt the need only to get away, to a place unknown, among people whose lives and even language I need never enter. I transferred my urgency to others. There was a master whom I had startled in my first year at Isabella Imperial by going up to him at the beginning of a class and asking, ‘Are you really a B.A.?’ I had seen the tremendous fact recorded in the school magazine. He saw irony where I had intended only reverence and he chased me back to my desk; he was, in fact, sensitive about his university, which was Canadian and obscure. Now I startled him again by asking, during a relaxed period, ‘How do you feel, sir, about living in Isabella?’ He saw it as a political question. I had to explain. ‘I mean you have lived in famous countries and seen famous cities. Don’t you think you would prefer to live there?’ He said, ‘I’ve never thought about it. I used to go to England and the Continent before the war on leave. It was all right. I did the usual things. But I always felt that my work was here. I’ve never thought about it, really.’ I didn’t believe him. I remembered how one day he began to talk about the varieties of Canadian apples. I remembered him saying another time, ‘You can go skiing in the Laurentians.’ And then, as though talking to himself, as though seeing the white-and-blue landscape again, he had added, ‘Mind you don’t break your leg, though’; and the moment and the imagined landscape had been fixed in my mind forever. The Laurentians! Beautiful name for slopes of white, uninhabited snow! I longed in that barrenness to go skiing, even at the risk of breaking my leg. My element, and I feared I would be denied it. And there was the Belgian, of execrable accent, French and English, and almost no memories: a neat, bored and boring man in goldrimmed glasses. Even he had gone off one afternoon into chuckling, glazed-eye reminiscence: the subject, la circulation, not circulation but traffic: and suddenly we were with him in a taxi in a traffic jam, the meter ticking, the taxi-driver pulling his cap over his eyes, disclaiming all responsibility for his active meter. There, in Liège in a traffic jam, on the snow slopes of the Laurentians, was the true, pure world. We, here on our island, handling books printed in this world, and using its goods, had been abandoned and forgotten. We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new.

My obsession took an odd turn. I developed the fear that our old timber house was unsafe. It was not uncommon in our city for houses to tumble down; during the rainy season our newspapers were full of such tragedies. I began to look for these reports, and every report added to my fear. As soon as I lay down on my bed my heart beat faster, and I mistook its throbbing for the shaking of the house. At times my head swam; ceiling and walls seemed about to cave in on me; I felt my bed tilt and I held on in a cold sweat until the disturbance passed. I was safe and lucid only when I was out of the house. So more and more I found myself abroad in that island whose secrets Browne was bent on revealing to me.

I had been able at certain moments to think of Isabella as deserted and awaiting discovery. Browne showed me that its tropical appearance was contrived; there was history in the vegetation we considered most natural and characteristic. About the bread-fruit and Captain Bligh we all knew. He told me about the coconut, which fringed our beaches, about the sugarcane, the bamboo and mango. He told me about our flowers, whose colours we saw afresh in the postcards which were beginning to appear in our shops. The war was bringing us visitors, who saw more clearly than we did; we learned to see with them, and we were seeing only like visitors. In the heart of the city he showed me a clump of old fruit trees: the site of a slave provision ground. From this point look above the roofs of the city, and imagine! Our landscape was as manufactured as that of any great French or English park. But we walked in a garden of hell, among trees, some still without popular names, whose seeds had sometimes been brought to our island in the intestines of slaves.

This was what Browne taught. This was the subject of his own secret reading. I thought his passion would resolve itself in a definition of a purpose or even an attitude. I was patient. But no definition came. He appeared to pursue the subject for its own sake. His friendship became a burden.

He cycled up to our house one Saturday morning and rang his bicycle bell from the street. Neither he nor any other boy from the school, except Cecil, had come to our house before. The visit showed to what extent we had abolished the private hemisphere of school, and I feel sure it was intended as a gesture. I was not in. My mother had not seen Browne before. She saw only an urchin of the people sitting on his bicycle saddle, ringing his bell and smiling. It was an unfortunate characteristic of Browne’s — until in his thirties he grew a beard — that he always appeared to be smiling nervously. The skin from his lower lip to the tip of his chin was curiously taut and corrugated; it was as though he was holding back a laugh. At the very tip of this chin, accentuating the smile that wasn’t a smile, was a wart; from a distance this looked like a drop of water and suggested that Browne had just washed his face and not bothered to dry it. All this gave him the comedian’s appearance which his parents had exploited. My mother looked out from between the ferns on our veranda and asked what he wanted. He said he wanted to see me. But he used my last name. My mother thought he was another mocker of her husband and herself and drove him away as she would have driven away a street arab.

I was appalled when I heard. I knew where he lived and I went straight there. His house was as old as ours and of similar style. But it was on one of the busy streets of the city; it had no veranda and rose almost directly from the pavement, with a jalousied top half. A genuine old-time Negro, grey-headed and pipe-smoking, was leaning out of a window and vacantly regarding the crowded street. He wore a grimy flannel vest. A flannel vest was proletarian wear — flannel the favoured material of Negroes enfeebled by illness or old age — and I wished I had not seen it on Browne’s father. Next to the house was a Negro barbershop called The Kremlin — Negro barber-shops liked to attach such remote drama to themselves — with a caged parrot in the doorway.

I greeted the Negro in the flannel vest and, remembering Browne’s misadventure at my house, hurriedly identified myself as a colleague of Browne’s at Isabella Imperial. I also took care to ask whether ‘Ethelbert’ was at home. It embarrassed me to use the name. I never had before and as I spoke it I remembered what Browne himself had told me: that slaves were frequently given the names of Anglo-Saxon kings or Roman generals. Browne’s father, he who had dressed up his son years before and taught him the words of the coon song, was at once attention. He grunted through his pipe, hurried to open the front door, and then was anxious for me to sit down. It was an honour not to me but to Isabella Imperial, the famous school, where a poor boy who behaved well and was attentive to his books could win a scholarship: this meant studies abroad, a profession, independence, the past wiped out.

There were two bentwood rockers in the front part of the room. He made me sit on one, called out ‘Bertie!’ and sat on the other, sucking at his pipe in old-time Negro fashion and staring at me while he rocked. Bertie! The home name! It was like opening a private letter. I felt that Browne wouldn’t care for this visit, for the revelation of his father in his flannel vest, which was grimy with little rolls of dirt. It was a narrow room, bounded by a maroon curtain whose reflection darkened the stained and polished floor. Beyond the rockers on which we sat four upright cane-bottomed chairs were arranged around a marble-topped centre table on three legs. The marble was covered with a white lacy material. On it was a brass tray with a stunted but still top-heavy palm in a tin wrapped around with crepe paper. At the top of the tin the crepe paper was finely fringed, almost minced, and fluffed out. On one wall, ochre-coloured with white facings, there were framed pictures of Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Haile Selassie, and Jesus. Against the opposite wall was a glass-doored cabinet with coloured tumblers, cherubs and pink-and-white ladies in glazed clay, three drunk top-hatted men in battered evening dress under a lamp standard, and a bouquet of paper flowers. Above this cabinet was a large photograph of a Negro man and woman, a girl, and a much bedecked boy whose tight chin with water-drop wart revealed him as Browne the comic singer, all standing before a painted backdrop of a ruined Greek temple. Browne’s father followed my eyes. He was past pride; but in his look there was that satisfaction which comes to the old and foolish who feel they have done a lot by living long.

He called out again in his strangled voice: ‘Bertie!’ And presently Browne pushed through the maroon curtain. He was wearing washed-out and frayed khaki shorts; he was barefooted; his eyes were red. He had been having a Saturday afternoon nap. He didn’t look pleased to see me. His father rocked, settling down to enjoy the dialogue between two scholars of Isabella Imperial. Browne barely greeted me and instantly pushed through the maroon curtain again. I had a glimpse of a small oval cyp dining table and some heavy polished chairs. I heard voices. Browne’s was raised in irritation; I heard him say something about that black jackass. Then to him who had shouted ‘Bertie!’ there came a female call, pretending to be less than a shout, of ‘Caesar!’ and ‘Caesar!’ again; and Caesar Browne got up and padded carefully over the polished floor in his slippers, cut-down canvas shoes, towards the maroon curtain, from behind which he was given an invisible tug, so that he appeared suddenly to have lost control of his limbs; and so, swiftly, he vanished.

Browne himself, when he reappeared, had a shirt over his flannel vest. The tropics do impose on their inhabitants this recurring indignity of undress, which only above a certain level turns to style. He sat in the rocker left empty by his father and yawned and passed his hands over his legs. He aimed at casualness, but he was glum and less than welcoming. I said I had come to borrow his copy of Peñas Arriba. He wasn’t fooled. But it gave him something to do. He went and got the book. It was the book of the careful student. Its covers were wrapped in brown shop-paper and were dark, furred and almost worn through at the edges where the palm had closed over them on those sweaty journeys to school. I thought it had a peculiar smell. I had nothing more to say. Then Browne’s sister came in with her boy-friend, from the Police. The tiny room was suddenly alive. For a minute or so, with indefinable unease, I witnessed actions and listened to talk. Then I left.

I ought not to have gone. I should have ignored Browne’s misadventure; I should never have let him know that I knew. We never forgive those who catch us in postures of indignity. That Saturday, with its two gestures, its two visits, its two failures, marked the end of the special intensity of our relationship. I cannot deny that I was relieved. I had been choked in that interior, and not only by its smallness. Joe Louis and Haile Selassie on the wall, the flannel vest, the family photograph, that black jackass: it was more than an interior I had entered. I felt I had had a glimpse of the prison of the spirit in which Browne lived, to which he awakened every day. In those rooms he collected his facts, out of which he could make no pattern. I doubted whether he knew why he passed on those facts to me. He wanted me to share distress. But, irritatingly, he stopped at distress. And as I left the house it occurred to me that distress was part of his reality, was nothing more, could lead to nothing. Into that private horror I did not want to be drawn again. Put Eden in those rooms, and it would have been fitting and comic. But Browne’s nerves denied comedy. In that interior all the attributes of his race and class were like secrets no friend ought to have gazed upon.

Our relationship ended. It had been unproductive; it left no rancour. Yet its poison remained with me. It was with me at school. Eden said he wished to join the Japanese army: the reports of their rapes were so exciting. He elaborated the idea crudely and often; it ceased to be a joke. He recognized this; in his conversation he sublimated the wish to rape foreign women into a wish to travel. Deschampsneufs said: ‘To see, or to be seen?’ He drew a grotesque picture of Eden with cloth cap, dark glasses, camera and white suit leaning over the rails of a ship, while sarong-clad Asiatics and Polynesians, abandoning their dances, rushed to the water’s edge to look at the strange tourist. For Eden had fixed on Asia as the continent he wished to travel in; he had been stirred by Lord Jim. His deepest wish was for the Negro race to be abolished; his intermediate dream was of a remote land where he, the solitary Negro among an alien pretty people, ruled as a sort of sexual king. Lord Jim, Lord Eden. Poor Eden. But, also, poor Browne. How could anyone, wishing only to abolish himself, go beyond a statement of distress?

At every reminder of our wide world I returned to that front room, his security, which he yet hated, where his shop-assistant sister brought in her young man, from the Police, and for a minute or so — unease later defining itself — were like cartoon characters, exaggerating their roles: Browne the younger brother, someone to be bribed and handled flatteringly, the young man modest and aggressive and slightly ridiculous, the sister herself brisk and decisive and standing no nonsense in her home. Perhaps I exaggerated. It was my tendency at the time, part of my anxiety to put myself in the place of those I thought were distressed; and perhaps, like those misguided reformers who believe that for rich and poor there is no reality but money, I failed to see much. I minimized the innocence; I minimized the quality of personality. But so it is when we seek to forget ourselves by taking on the burden of others. Was it only for Browne that I was concerned?

I had begun to spend much time in the cinema. It was my own refuge. On weekdays I went either to the late afternoon show or the evening show. On Saturdays I went to the one-thirty afternoon show which some of the cheaper cinemas put on. It was the hottest time of day, but these shows were packed out by the young, attracted like myself by the atmosphere of holiday and licence. It was shockingly bright when we came out at about four; this was as dramatic and pleasing as the shock of true heat after an air-conditioned room.

I was at a one-thirty show one Saturday. It was very hot. Some of the rowdier college boys, mainly white and brown, took off their shirts. It began to rain. One or two groups continued shirtless, but they were noticeably quieter. The rain drummed on the corrugated-iron roof: that sound, comforting to us in the tropics, which people from other zones detest. Above the rain and the drumming came the sound of thunder, obliterating the soundtrack. The heavy curtains over the open exits flapped and the rain spattered in. The rain went on, gust upon heavy gust crashing from one end of the roof to the other. Soon the floor of the cinema was running wet. We willingly gave up the film. Our tropical days were even; we enjoyed it when they were dramatized. But then I thought of our house and the dangers of rain. On the screen the film ran on, but the exit curtains had been pulled back by those who preferred to watch the rain, and the picture was faint. The soundtrack was inaudible. The diminished, pointless gestures of the actors gave pleasure to a rowdy few.

I went out and stood in the tiled lobby among the boards which displayed the posters, tacky in the damp, for the afternoon and the evening shows. It thundered; lightning was fluorescent; the trees in the park before us rocked in the wind, which fell and rose. The gutters were already full and, even as I watched, the pavements were covered. A cyclist went by. He was going nowhere in particular. He was simply cycling in water for the fun. More boys and girls came out and stood in the lobby to watch. We loved our bad weather. I thought of our house again, more urgently now; and, above drama, I felt alarm. A tree in the park groaned in a series of accelerating snaps and then slowly collapsed, rocking to rest on its branches. It was a great tree, one of those with a history. Its leaves were green and shining with wet, its shallow, lateral roots shaggy with earth.

I went out into the rain. The flooded pavement was indistinguishable from the road. Rain obscured our eastern hills and blurred all nearer outlines. Under shop eaves there were damp contemplative little groups. My mind played with images of disaster. It created a house reduced to rubble, embedded in rippled mud, like those tree trunks washed up on our coast. It created wet, isolated planks, crusted with old paint on one side, raw where newly exposed, twisted corrugated-iron sheets, death, the discovery later of little intimate things. Walking in the rain, I knew the panic I sometimes felt when I lay down to sleep.

The rain slackened. I felt the wetness of my clothes and the coldness of the coins in my pockets. And when I got to our street I found only calm. Through some engineer’s skill this section of our city, though below sea-level, was especially well drained. There was no flooding here. The gutters were racing, but everything still stood, washed and shining with that newness which came to our roofs and roads and vegetation after rain. My mother was sewing. For her the rain had only been a Saturday afternoon drama, a cause for pleasant little shiverings in the cool. I was relieved. At least the discomfort and ridicule of disaster had been spared us. But, equally, I could not keep down disappointment: the disappointment of someone who had been denied the chance of making a fresh start, alone.

5

THE house of my mother’s family was solid. I tested it whenever I went there for the week-end. I jumped on the floors when I thought no one was looking; and sometimes I lay flat on them to gauge their level. I leaned against walls to assess their straightness. These precautions made me feel safe and sent me to bed without fear. I did not like returning to the physical dangers of my own house, about which I could talk to no one, and I longed for the time when I would not have to make that particular journey. I thought that this absurd disorder, of placelessness, was part of youth and my general unease and that it would go as soon as I left Isabella. But certain emotions bridge the years. It was unease of just this sort which came to me when I began this book. There was then no fear of the collapse of either the hotel or the public house between which I divided my time — as I still divide it — but I sickeningly recognized that sense of captivity and lurking external threat, that pain of a rich world destroyed and rendered null. Perhaps it was the effort of writing. The houses by which I was surrounded — like those in a photograph I had studied in a Kensington High Street attic during a snowfall and sought in imagination to enter, to re-create that order which, as I thought, expressed its sweetness in young girls and especially in one in a jumper in a sunny back garden — the red brick houses became interchangeable with those others in our tropical street, of corrugated iron and fretted white gables, which I had also once hoped never to see again. Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places. Sometimes by this linking the sense of place is destroyed, and we are ourselves alone: the young man, the boy, the child. The physical world, which we yet continue to prove, is then like a private fabrication we have always known.

A solid house, however. It also offered freedom from the island of Browne and Deschampsneufs. My early attempt at simplification had failed; it had ended in this switching back and forth between one world and another, one set of relationships and another. My grandparents’ house had changed. It had become a house of the young, mainly Cecil’s friends, the sons and daughters of business families like his own. The community they formed was small and new. It took me by surprise. I have said I was not interested in the credentials of Deschampsneufs’s family. But then I was not interested in the credentials of any family except my own. Outside school this had been my world, with Bella Bella and Coca-Cola its peaks. It had not occurred to me that there might be other families like mine with equal cause for self-love, people who made shirts or built roads and thought they were doing quite nicely. And it was disappointing, I must confess, to see the splendour of Bella Bella fade a little. These young people were like Cecil. They were not as extravagant, but they had the same capacity for talk about occasions they had just staged and occasions that were about to be staged. I could not feel for them the affection I felt for Cecil, who was my flesh and blood; and I could not feel I was part of their group. My sisters, though, fitted in easily. But if I was no longer completely at ease in the house, at least I found there no talk of past injury, no talk even of the past. These young people were of the new world. They made the photographs of Indian actors in the back veranda appear quaint and old; the prints, of gods and maidens and swings in the flower spangled lawns of white palaces outlined in splayed perspective, were of an antiquated piety.

The house had another attraction. Sally had become my partner, Sally the stamper in a seersucker housecoat. Enemies as children, and bound by that special relationship, we had inevitably drawn closer in the changed house. No word was spoken. We simply came together; and nothing again was to equal that sudden understanding, that shared feeling of self-violation, which was for me security and purity. I could not conceive of myself with a girl or woman of another community or even of families like my own. Here for me was security, understanding, the relationship based on perfect knowledge, in which body of one flesh joined to body of the same flesh, and all external threat was diminished. Later I would have the reputation of a lecher and whoremaster. But in every relationship I would be aware of taint; I would recognize triumph or humiliation. There would be nothing again like this mutual acceptance, without words or declarations, without posturings or deceptions; and no flesh was to be as sweet as this, almost my own. I began to think of the world, which I had longed to enter, as the violation that awaited us both, inevitable but not the less painful; it was like growing old or dying. I felt I was losing the courage to enter that world. My longing to escape had turned sour; the island had become my past. My world had narrowed. And at the same time I felt I was like the older people in this house now of the young. I was like my mother and her parents, who found themselves waiting for the end in a house that had grown strange.

I had left school. The war was still on, and it was impossible to travel. I took a job. So did we all. Eden, fulfilling Major Grant’s prophecy about those boys who failed English, was snapped up by one of our newspapers. Hok — ‘the exception that proves the rule’: Major Grant’s reported words, when he heard the news — joined the Inquirer as a feature-writer. His name presently began appearing above stylishly written articles, whose cleverness could still give me a twinge of jealousy, that jealousy — so easily converted into open admiration — which is the tribute we pay to the naturally brilliant. Browne worked as a clerk of some sort on the American army base. I heard he was writing a novel about a slave. Many people knew the plot: the slave leads a revolt, which is betrayed and brutally crushed; he escapes to the forest, reflects, arrives at self-disgust, and returns willingly to slavery and death. I saw a carbon of an early chapter, the second, I believe. The slaves arrive from Africa; they are happy to be on land again; they dance and sing; they beg to be bought quickly. The scene was all done in mime, as it were, and from a distance. It was brutal and disagreeable; I didn’t want to read more. I don’t believe more was written.

Deschampsneufs got a job in one of the banks. Those jobs in the banks! The resentment they aroused! They were reserved, quite sensibly, for those whose families had had some secure — rather than lustful and distant — experience of money; and these jobs had as a result acquired the glamour of whiteness and privilege. Eden met me one day on the street and told me enviously about Deschampsneufs’s duties. It seemed that Deschampsneufs had already been put on to weighing coins. To Eden this casual, wholesaler approach to the coin of the realm — as though it was just another commodity like flour or peas — was maddeningly luxurious. This was the level of our island innocence. And I could see, too, that Deschampsneufs was still up to his usual mischief: consciously exciting envy by revealing what he thought were secrets to people who, he rightly judged, longed to know them from the inside. He had succeeded with Eden, who was delighted to know that coins were weighed, and infuriated that he wasn’t allowed to do a little weighing himself.

I couldn’t give Eden the sympathy he needed. I wasn’t weighing coins. But I was doing an equally dreary job. I was working in a government department as an acting second-class clerk and writing out certificates of one sort and another by hand. The early months of any job are the longest, and I began to feel that I would never leave the department, that some disaster would occur and I would be compelled to stay there for the rest of my life. Pay-day was especially painful. Everybody came in frowning, in a simulated temper; no one spoke; and all morning subordinates and superiors applied themselves with every sign of pain to their duties, which on that day seemed especially onerous. At about ten the first-class clerk, like a man choking down rage, went off with a money sack to the Treasury; he came back an hour later and, losing nothing of his hangman’s grimness, sat down at his desk and distributed the money he had brought into various envelopes. No one looked at him; everyone was furiously at work. Then he made the rounds, offering envelopes and a sheet for signature. Everyone signed; no one checked his envelope. The older men handled their envelopes most casually of all, tossing them to one corner of their crowded tables or into a drawer, and just letting them lie there. Half an hour later the trips to the lavatory started; one by one the envelopes passed out of sight, their contents checked. After lunch it was like a holiday. The men were red-eyed and high, giving satisfied little belches; the girls giggled in the vault, showing one another the purchases, usually of underwear, they had made during the lunch hour.

They were all people: I could see no reason why I should be spared. I began to envy the older clerks simply for having lived their lives through. I envied them their calm, their deep pay-day pleasures, their withdrawal from struggle. I envied them the age in their faces, the cultivated deliberateness of their gestures and movements. Cultivated, I now feel: those men were not as old as they appeared to me. I longed to be old. I feared to go out, to be by myself. I could not settle down to any reading. I required only the darkness that Sally provided. Part of my sickness, and I feared my sickness. But I hoped that such a fear would in the end be its own protection. Every week-end I went to the solid house and found Sally. The violation we feared, the violation I feared for her but recognized as inevitable: from this I rescued her, knowing that with every week-end the time for rescue and purity was narrowing.

For the sake of appearances I was forced to go on expeditions with Cecil and his friends and be the wild young man with them. Their wildness could be overdone. Cecil never ceased to enjoy his money and never lost the desire to startle the poor by his money. On a country road he would stop with a squeal of brakes just inches from some poor old woman selling bananas or oranges from a tray. He would shout, ‘Get out! Go home, you ugly bitch! Leave that blasted tray this minute if you don’t want me to break it on your head.’ The terrified woman would make as if to obey; he would call her back angrily and give her ten dollars or twenty dollars, extravagant payment for the tray and oranges he didn’t want but still took. Cecil still behaved as though smoking and drinking were vices he had discovered and patented. He visited degraded Negro whores. Pleasure for him appeared to lie in an increase in self-violation; he was like a man testing his toleration of the unpleasant. I believed in his high spirits less and less. But he communicated these to some of his friends and he communicated them especially to a Negro man of about forty whom he had attached to himself as a bodyguard-companion-valet. He called this Negro Cecil. It might have been the man’s real name; it might just have been Cecil’s fancy. The Negro was illiterate and penniless and seemed to have no family. He depended entirely on Cecil and I got the impression that when they were together in public they liked playing a very dramatic master-and-servant, gangster-and-henchman game. I believe they both saw themselves acting out a film; the smallness of their activities must have been a continual frustration to them. I thought they were both unbalanced.

From these expeditions it was good to return to Sally. It was a big house, but on week-ends it was full of people. Discovery was inevitable. It was a visitor who found us. I had seen her around, somebody’s mother or aunt, very old, very frail, with glasses that grotesquely magnified her eyes. I was totally blank: no shame, no guilt, no anxiety. I hated as the deeper intrusion the cross-examination that followed. It was detailed and I thought pointless; it reduced everything to absurdity. But for all the threats, there was no sequel then. The visitor’s feebleness of sight and body seemed to be matched by the feebleness of her memory. When we next met at the house she had forgotten who I was.

At the house that Sunday was a young man I hadn’t seen before. He was introduced as Dalip. He was well dressed and showed no uneasiness at being in a house of strangers. Cecil proposed that the three of us should drive to the beach before lunch. Movement was one of Cecil’s ideas of fun; very often there was nothing to do when we got to a particular place. I was tired of these drives. But Cecil insisted, and Dalip was agreeable. We stopped in a side street not far away. Cecil sounded his horn and his valet came running out. He appeared to have been waiting; he always appeared to be waiting for Cecil. He had a bottle of whisky and a bottle of rum. He sat in the back with Dalip.

We were soon out in the country. We drove at great speed along narrow, curving roads. ‘They know me, they know me,’ Cecil said, as though this was going to keep us from an accident. He was pleased that I was uneasy. The valet grinned, hanging on to the strap. Dalip was relaxed. We came to an area of curves and hills. The car possessed the road right and left impartially, and once we came to a shocking halt before a bus that appeared round a bend. They celebrated by opening the bottles. I drank with them. The liquor was hateful. In the racing car it was not easy to pour or to drink. Rum and whisky were spilt. The car smelled of rum.

Cecil said, ‘Open that glove compartment for me a little.’

I obeyed. Among yellow cloths and grimy glossy booklets and pads I saw two pistols. One small, with an ivory butt; one big, of pure metal. I had never seen a pistol before.

‘Take the big fellow out.’

I took out the big pistol. The car shot over the brow of a hill on the wrong side of the road. I had never held a pistol. I had thought it was all metal, but now I saw that the butt had wood facings, finely cross-hatched. I was astonished at the weight, astonished at the colour of the metal, the precision of the moulding. This precision was like beauty. I passed my fingers along the edges.

‘A Luger,’ Cecil said. ‘Heavy, eh?’

In the back seat Dalip and the Negro grinned like men in a secret, who also knew about Lugers.

Cecil, staring ahead, one hand on the wheel, dipped into his shirt pocket with that elegant left-handed gesture, all flexible wrist, with which he usually fished out his packet of cigarettes. He pulled out a bullet. He said, ‘This goes with that.’

I put the Luger back. I took out the smaller gun. It was old and smooth.

‘Nice little thing,’ Cecil said. ‘It’s Belgian. A revolver for ladies. You can cover it in the palm of your hand. Try and see.’

I said, ‘I prefer the Luger.’

I put the revolver back and closed the glove compartment. It was their idea of fun. The cigarettes, the drinks, the fast car going nowhere, the throwing away of money on frightened peasants. And now the guns.

An early Sunday morning, and the beach was deserted. From the cocoteraie brackish streams ran under fallen trees into the sand. The sky was grey. It wasn’t going to be a day of sunshine. We stripped. Dalip was plump and would soon be fat. Cecil was thin and stringy and strong as he had always been.

The Negro had the physique of a weightlifter. We stripped but did not go into the water. Cecil began to idle about and we idled with him. How well I knew this idling about of Cecil’s! It was out of such idling that he fashioned his stories of wonderful times. He kicked sand and did foolish things with coconut branches. The Negro did what he did. Dalip picked up shells and sea eggs. But above all they drank. Soon they were talking with a sort of childlike philosophy about the sea. The sea. Not my element. Yet it entered so many of my memories of the island.

Suddenly, kicking his big toe hard into the sand, and looking up from the spattering sand to me, Cecil said: ‘You never met Dalip before? You know who he is?’

I looked at Dalip. His easy-going face had altered. His expression was of pure hate.

Cecil roared with laughter in that breath-holding, neighing way he had — the nostrils that were so fine in his sister were on him slightly flared — and he said, slapping his thigh, ‘Your brother, you damn fool!’

I knew at once what he meant. It was not pleasant. This Dalip was the son of the widow who had been living with my father after he had become Gurudeva and taken to the hills. I had hoped never to see her or the son of whom I had heard. But such a meeting had to come; the wonder was that it had not come before. We were a small community, our upper element crisscrossed with marriages, inbred already. There could be no hiding, no secrets. But now, looking at Dalip, soft and very pale, I again had that sense of being forced to eat raw flesh and drink tainted oil; and that sense of the obscene obliterated shame.

Dalip said, ‘The son of Guru, eh?’

The Negro laughed.

Cecil leaned against the bleached trunk of a tree that had collapsed on some other island or continent and had been washed ashore here and anchored in sand. He set his mouth and looked hard at me. I understood. He held a bottle of Coca-Cola by the waist. The wrist-watch on his left wrist adorned his naked body.

My mind raced. It fixed on a word. I thought of the Luger and the single bullet, the Belgian ladies’ revolver. It was so early in the morning. I thought of one word. Execution. It had occurred before. We were a small community and in a very deep sense we did not recognize the law of the desert island. Our code remained private and whole. Execution, then, on the hot sand on a Sunday morning. A family affair: it could be concealed: such things had been done before. A disappearance; a gutted body sinking to the bottom of the sea beyond the reach of a fisherman’s seine. Yet I couldn’t believe in it. It would be foolish to behave as though this was about to happen. Nothing had been announced. I asked for a drink. They gave me rum. I would have preferred whisky. But I drank the rum. It was raw and sickening. I found, to my alarm, that I was passive. I was like the mouse or lizard mesmerized by the cat. I accepted. I was prepared to do what was expected of me.

The taunting, as I saw it, began. Dalip was red with drink and his face was swollen, the eyes heavy-lidded. He threw some sand at my feet and said, ‘The son of the great leader. Well, let me tell you. I don’t think he is any great damn leader, you hear. He is a skunk. A crook. A vagabond. They should have locked him up long time.’

Strange this taunting. What was said left me cold. Yet I responded to it because I knew it was taunting.

Cecil, reclined against the tree trunk, that silver strap so noticeable on his bare arm, grinned in his breath-holding way. His valet grinned with him.

I began a sentence: ‘Who the hell do you think —’ and then gave it up, overcome by the weariness of thinking out and speaking a sentence to its end.

‘I will tell you something,’ Dalip said. ‘Your father owes me thirty dollars. Thirty dollars.’

When? Facing execution, my own helplessness, my own acceptance. When? I tried to imagine this other life my father had created, this rediscovery of himself and those gifts the missionary’s lady had seen: that other life, with its own familiar bonds, so familiar that they might include a request for money. In weakness, as a suppliant? Or out of the prophet’s strength and contempt for the things men held to be of value?

‘Thirty dollars.’

Tears came to my eyes. So suddenly I had taken on my father’s pain. It was a debt that had to be repaid, and instantly. Before the future took its course. Thirty dollars. What a sum! But it had once been needed. It had once been asked for. Poor Gurudeva! The tears were tears of my own humiliation as well. For all my wish to repay this debt, to wipe out this insult, I did not have this sum. But I ran to the car as though I had the money. I took out the dollar-notes from my trouser-pockets. Just about twelve. In the car, crouching over the seat behind the open door, I thought: the Luger. But I didn’t have the bullet. I remembered: that was in Cecil’s shirt. But I was unwilling to touch that shirt. Would I know how to insert the bullet? And perhaps the word and the horror lay only in my own mind. It was an absurd situation. The absurdity didn’t lighten me. I would have to go laughing to my death, and up to the last I would have to pretend that death was in no one’s mind. I left the Luger in the glove compartment. I ran back with the dollar notes and offered them to Dalip.

He said, ‘That’s not thirty dollars.’

‘I will give you the rest later.’

‘I just want my thirty dollars.’

I threw the notes at his feet. And of course, I thought, as they fell to rest on the dry sand, they won’t stay there when this is all over.

He hit me. I hit him, though I wished to go without a fight. And he was drunk. Cecil and his valet, side by side now against the tree trunk, laughed. Dalip threw himself on me. He was heavy, uncontrolled. He missed me and stumbled. He lifted a twisted and polished piece of driftwood. With this he tried to hit me. It was too heavy for him. It fell of its own weight and I was able to get out of the way. Cecil threw some sand on me. His valet did likewise. They had come closer.

Cecil said: ‘The Luger. The bullet in my shirt.’

And, really, I hadn’t thought he had left it in his shirt. The Negro ran easily to the car, a man with much time. I ceased to fight. I let Cecil and Dalip hit me. They threw me on the ground and punched me and kicked me. And even then I could not be sure of their aim.

‘Thirty dollars. Your father owes me thirty dollars.’ Dalip repeated the sentence over and over.

And I only thought: the sea, the sand, the green waves, the breakers, the quaint ships with sails, the morning music. Not my element, and I was ending here. And I had a vision of the three of us shipwrecked and lost, alien and degenerate, the last of our race on this island, among collapsed trees and sand, so smooth where no one had walked on it.

‘A car,’ Cecil’s valet said.

I heard the wheels on coconut husks and sand. A door slammed. There were voices.

Cecil laughed and said loudly, ‘But what the hell is wrong with this man on the sand?’

On a bank, just a few feet high, above the brackish freshwater stream from the cocoteraie, I saw a white family. I got up. Dalip got up. He didn’t laugh like Cecil and the Negro. He was still angry, still complaining about his thirty dollars. He still made attempts to fight. He was very drunk. Cecil and his valet kept on laughing, acting for the newcomers. I was forced to struggle with Dalip. The newcomers watched.

‘Swim!’ Cecil said.

The Negro ran to the water. Cecil chased him as if in sport. I threw off Dalip and followed them. He fell and remained where he fell. The family went walking on the beach, some in ordinary clothes, some in swimming costume. Dalip raised himself after a little and staggered to the car. He opened the door and appeared to collapse on the back seat among the clothes and the towels. I was at last out of the shallows. The water broke over me, the great breakers — the faded white board on the beach said in red Danger — and with every breaker I felt closer to myself. It was a coming back from far, as the hill people said. Whence had that mood of the previous minutes come? The sea and the sand. Oh, never again.

Later we found Dalip asleep and totally naked. He had tried to dress but had only got as far as taking off his swimming pants. He had tried to drink some more. The rum bottle was on its side and uncorked and almost empty; rum soaked and scented our clothes. He had apparently also tried to walk home. We followed his tracks through the dry hot sand below the coconut trees to the road. The asphalt was lumpy and rutted and full of holes, green at the base, in which water had collected. About fifty feet up the road he had collapsed. Soft, pale flesh, innocent abused face, genitals foolish and slack. We lifted him back into the car and put some clothes on him.

We drove back at a rate. The car was damp and gritty with sand and smelled of rum. We put Dalip down at his house. It was a large, clumsy, two-storeyed concrete dwelling, painted in vivid colours. I could see pictures of Hindu deities and Mahatma Gandhi in the top veranda. When we got back to the house they were only reading newspapers. Lunch was to come. It was still morning; the adventure had been brief. The story Cecil told was the story of Dalip’s drunkenness. He referred to nothing else.

Some doubt remained in my mind. Some doubt remains now. Dalip telephoned the next day and apologized. His voice was soft and winning. I told him not to worry. But I took care not to meet him. We met again years later, after we had both gone abroad and come back. By then the issue was dead; accounts had been settled, down to the thirty dollars.

I never went back to Cecil’s house. I never saw Sally again. They sent her off some months later to a girl’s college in the the United States. I knew she would never come back to Isabella. So she went out into the contamination of the wider world and was absorbed in it. And I was free to do the same. I was as blank as I had been at the moment we were discovered. I went to my office and wrote out my certificates and what grief I felt sank into the emptiness that had been with me for some time. That did not lift.

I heard more about the Luger, though.

Cecil’s father bought a cinema in the country. It was the last thing he bought. It was not much of an investment from his point of view, and I believe that at the back of his mind there was the idea, of a perverted asceticism, that what was frivolity to the rest of the world was to him business. At the end of his career he was back, in a way, and now from perfect security, to ‘fulling bottles with a funnel’. I also believe it was the last act of his special piety: the cinema showed mainly Indian films.

The cinema became Cecil’s toy. It was Coca-Cola all over again: unlimited access to a delight for which the rest of the world had to pay. It was also another place to drive to. He was in and out of the cinema with his valet, harassing the manager; it gave him pleasure to be recognized in the village as the man who owned the cinema. He arrived drunk one evening, when a film was running, and ordered the manager to put on the house lights. There were shouts from the hall. He walked in, Luger in hand, his valet behind him. They climbed up to the stage. They were caught in the light of the projector and threw enormous shadows on the screen. He fired one shot into the floor and one at the ceiling. ‘Get out! Take your money back and get out.’ Some people lined up outside the manager’s office, but most went home. The house lights were dimmed again. Inside Cecil sat, his feet on the seat in front, the Luger in his lap, watching the film, alone with his valet, who didn’t know the language.

I got the story from my sisters. They continued to live in the house. There they continued to meet the young men to whom they had become engaged. For them Cecil was now only part of the atmosphere of their romances; and this was just another Cecil story, like the famous one of his boyhood about the cases of Pepsi-Cola on the picnic launch.

I remained uncertain about that Sunday morning on the beach. But its revelation, its surprise, had been my sudden and intense sympathy for my father. Poor Gurudeva! There on the beach I had felt linked to his power, madness and humiliation. Thirty dollars. The time was to come when I could pay that sum ten thousand times over. But I remembered.

6

JUST after the end of the war Cecil’s father died. His disappointment in Cecil showed in his will, which was unexpectedly scattering. He left my mother enough money for her to say she was well off. He also left fair sums to my sisters and myself. In addition he left me some valueless land, which I tried in vain to sell. If Cecil was peeved he didn’t show it. My grandfather used to say, proudly at first, later with resignation, that Cecil was born to give away. He was right. Within two years Cecil had run Bella Bella down and lost the Coca-Cola licence. Though even then, from what I heard, he lost nothing of his bounce, dramatizing his decline, seeing himself as a victim of fate alone and happy with his memories of childhood as the great days.

The last time I saw him before I left Isabella was on a Monday morning in our main street. He ran out from a bar and asked me to have a beer with him. His friendliness was was so pure and anxious, and this made him so attractive that I agreed, although it was not yet eleven. He was wearing a brilliant white shirt and a tie. This was unusual. He said he was going to the bank. ‘I need a few cents,’ he said loudly. With his left hand he held his half-empty glass almost at the bottom and rapped it hard on the counter. ‘I am going to ask them for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, boy.’ He gave a grunt. I didn’t believe him; I thought he was only trying to impress the barman. But I was concerned for Bella Bella. He also said there was going to be some religious ceremony for his father at the house. He wanted me to come. I said I would. But I didn’t intend to go, and he knew that. The house, now his, was no longer my place of escape: no more the glamour of Coca-Cola, or the security of level floors.

Consider me ungracious. But consider me perhaps also lucky, in that at a time of change I no longer needed these props. I was at last about to leave. I had written to colleges in various parts of the world and I had been accepted by the School in London. Many other people, of every sort, were leaving; the ambition, I now saw, had not been mine alone. The war had brought the world closer to us: the traffic jams in Liège, the white slopes of the Laurentians, the landscapes that imagination had filled out from the drawings by H. M. Brock in a French reader. A few more scholarships were being offered. Browne got one. He was going to London, to do languages: a disappointment to his family, who required a professional man. I heard no more about his novel. Eden applied for a scholarship to study journalism in Canada and, to our horror, almost got it. His failure didn’t worry him too much; he settled down happily to studying the movements of ships and passengers for his paper. Hok applied for nothing; a type of lethargy had come over him; he was also reportedly in love.

I used to meet Deschampsneufs from time to time. He was still in the bank and still painting. He had no immediate plans for travel. He said he didn’t feel ready for Quebec or Paris just yet. I got the impression that he was enjoying his reputation in Isabella as a ‘radical’. He had created a stir in our Art Association by painting either a red donkey in a green sky or a green donkey in a red sky. There had been letters to the newspaper, for and against, quoting all sorts of famous names; and at the end Champ had become a figure. He continued to treat me as a ‘serious’ person and we would have intellectual conversations. I believe we both enjoyed the idea of ourselves walking about the rundown colonial city and talking art and ideas. He was getting interested in religion and regarded me as an expert. I didn’t think the reason was flattering — it seemed a curious tribute to my father — but I pretended to speak with the authority he required. These conversations were a strain; I think we were both always a little glad when they ended.

About a month before I left we met by chance in a café one lunchtime. We exchanged an idea or two. Then he said: ‘I hope you can come home one day before you go.’

I was miserable with embarrassment. He spoke like one who knew that an invitation to his home was something which many people on the island would welcome. He also spoke like someone who knew he was exposing himself to a snubbing of sorts, since no one is as ready to snub as the oppressed and the powerless when they find themselves suddenly courted. And again he spoke like someone who was asking for both these considerations to be put aside. His invitation was his offer of reconciliation, his sealing of our stiff intellectuals’ friendship.

I didn’t want to go to his house. We could meet easily only on neutral ground. But I didn’t wish to appear snubbing. I played for time.

I asked, ‘How is the vine?’

‘A strange thing. It’s been attacked by ants.’

The invitation hung in the air.

I said, ‘What’s a good day?’

We fixed an afternoon.

I had given up the island. But a family, especially if it is at home, can impose its idea of itself; and it was to this idea that I found myself reacting when I went to the house. Deschampsneufs’s parents were there and his younger sister Wendy. The father was stocky and swarthy; the mother was pale and thin with no hips to speak of and a sharp worn-out face. Wendy was as thin as her mother but more engagingly ugly. She was at the rubbing-up, flesh-testing, showing-off stage. She climbed over me and my chair, stood on her head in another chair and generally asked for attention. I was told there was some trouble about getting her into a school.

Mrs Deschampsneufs said, ‘She is a very intelligent child, though they don’t seem to think so here. I took her to a psychiatrist in New York when I was there.’

I expressed my interest. I half-believed that psychiatrists existed only in cartoons.

‘He said she was above normal. Very high I.Q.’

Wendy was standing on her head in a deep chair at the end of the room.

‘And it wasn’t as if he knew anything about us or anything like that.’

There were photographs on the walls of various members of the family, including one which I took to be of the great Deschampsneufs, the leader of the man without in 1877. There was also a very large oil painting of a woman in early nineteenth-century costume. The painting looked new and shiny and I thought it was appallingly done. There were also group photographs; pictures of the French countryside; one or two of French châteaux; and half a dozen old prints in old frames of Isabellan scenes: people landing on surfy beaches and being taken ashore on the backs of naked Negroes, forest vegetation, a waterfall, Negroes in straw hats and striped knee-length trousers rolling casks of rum. There were also, on one wall, the photographs at which I feared to look: racehorses, Tamango no doubt among them.

‘I hear that you are going to England,’ Mrs Deschampsneufs said. ‘I wonder how you’ll like it.’ She had been flattening out her accent; now she sounded like a woman of the people. I thought she was going to make some remark about the rain or the cold. But what she said, making a face, was, ‘Whitey-pokey.’

Her husband raised a hand in tolerant reproof.

I was mortified. This was the term used by Negroes of the street to describe white people. To me it was as obscene in connotation as it sounded. I wondered whether I had always misunderstood the word or whether Mrs Deschampsneufs, attempting vulgarity, hadn’t gone farther than she knew. By the judgement of the street she was whitey-pokey herself, very much so. But she appeared pleased with the word. She used it again. It occurred to me that this might be her attempt at the common touch: her statement, to the man she judged political and nationalist, that she belonged to the island as much as and perhaps more than anyone else. Her next sentence confirmed this.

‘It might be, of course, because I’m French. But I don’t think anyone from Isabella can get on with those people. We are different. This place is a paradise, boy. You’ll find that out for yourself.’

Mr Deschampsneufs asked me, ‘Do you like music?’

I made a noise which left the issue open.

He got up from his chair and, with Wendy clinging to his legs and impeding his passage, went to the bookcase. He opened the glass door and took two cards from a shelf.

‘Here are some tickets for the concert at the Town Hall. We can’t go. Champ doesn’t like music, and I don’t think they should be wasted. It isn’t as if we get these things every day.’

‘Roger is always being sent things like that,’ Mrs Deschampsneufs said.

‘Take them,’ her husband insisted.

‘Otherwise no one will use them,’ she said.

Well, I took the tickets.

Mrs Deschampsneufs asked me what I intended to do in London. I told her about the School. But she was interested in smaller things. She wanted to know how I thought I would spend a Sunday, for instance. I didn’t know what she expected. She pressed me. But I wasn’t going to betray myself by fantasy.

She said, ‘I imagine you’ll be coming back with a whitey-pokey bride.’

Her husband said, ‘But why do you want to arrange everybody’s life?’

‘Let me tell you, boy. Take a tip from somebody who has seen the world, eh. Don’t.’

With that she left the room.

Mr Deschampsneufs said, ‘What do you think you will do when you come back? I don’t see much scope here for what you intend to do there.’

But I was still thinking about Mrs Deschampsneufs. She had been a little too aggressive, and I thought: goodness, she was aggressive because to her I was someone who was already abroad, no longer subject to the rules of the island.

Champ said, ‘Who is arranging everybody’s life? Why do you think everybody must pine so to come back?’

His father said, ‘Oh, yes, we all want to get away and so on. But where you are born is a funny thing. My greatgrandfather and even my grandfather, they always talked about going back for good. They went. But they came back. You know, you are born in a place and you grow up there. You get to know the trees and the plants. You will never know any other trees and plants like that. You grow up watching a guava tree, say. You know that browny-green bark peeling like old paint. You try to climb that tree. You know that after you climb it a few times the bark gets smooth-smooth and so slippery you can’t get a grip on it. You get that ticklish feeling in your foot. Nobody has to teach you what the guava is. You go away. You ask, “What is that tree?” Somebody will tell you, “An elm.” You see another tree. Somebody will tell you, “That is an oak.” Good; you know them. But it isn’t the same. Here you wait for the poui to flower one week in the year and you don’t even know you are waiting. All right, you go away. But you will come back. Where you born, man, you born. And this island is a paradise, you will discover.’

I said, feeling that he was seeking to drag me back into his world, where he walked with security, ‘I am not coming back.’

He wasn’t put out. ‘It’s what I always say. You fellows from the Orient and so on, ancient civilization etcetera, you are the long-visioned types. You give up too easily. Just the opposite of our Afric brethren. Short-visioned. Can’t look ahead, and nothing to look back to. That is why I am sorry to say I can’t see our Afric friends coming to much. Lot of noise and so on, but short-visioned. I’ll tell you. You know those fellows in the South American bush, when they kill something, say a deer or something like that, you know they just sit down and eat out the whole damn thing, man. They not putting aside any for the morrow, you know.’ He gave a little laugh as he broke into the popular accent.

I said, ‘You mean the bush-Negroes?’

‘Indians.’ He gave another laugh. ‘Amerindians. Bucks, you know. But a similar short-visioned type.’

He was launched on what was clearly a favourite theory. The example he had given, of the South-American deer-feast, had that feel, of a fact polished to myth by its frequent use in argument. In his own way he was a racial expert. His knowledge ranged wide and in some places touched my own, which I had thought personal and sufficiently recondite. The names of books he mentioned revealed him as an addict of racial theory. He rejected simple racial divisions as a crudity. Instead he divided nations into the short-visioned, like the Africans, who remained in a state of nature; the long-visioned like Indians and Chinese, obsessed with thoughts of eternity; and the medium-visioned, like himself. The medium-visioned were the doers, the survivors.

‘No great philosophy and so on, but we’ve survived. Goodness, how many revolutions?’ He pretended to count. ‘The French Revolution, for one. What happened? We came over to this part of the world, to Santo Domingo. And then there was that revolution there. Let’s not talk about Haiti. Ten glorious years of revolution etcetera etcetera, but never mention the hundred and thirty, forty, years afterwards. Let’s not talk about Haiti. Anyway, then we came here. Tonnerre! No sooner here than our friends the English take over. Look at the result. Listen to me talking English in my low Isabella accent. Champ here can scarcely talk French.’

It was true. Champ’s French was dreadful.

‘But we’re still around. That lady you see there’ — he pointed to the shiny and terrible oil portrait — ‘was an ancestor of this boy.’

‘Not of yours,’ Champ said. It seemed a family joke.

‘She was born in Santo Domingo. It wasn’t too bad with old Toussaint in the beginning. Then of course we all came here. She was still a child. When she was about fifteen she went to Paris. To be educated, to get to know people. You know. She was very pretty, as you can see. She was a little bit wild too. I think you can see that too. Very popular and sought after and so on. She used to stay in the house of a woman called Clémentine Curial.’

I didn’t know the name.

‘Her husband was a general, a count. What I call Napoleon brand. There was a man who was in and out of the house. Ugly little fellow, full of talk. And not too well off either. He was about forty, and writing a lot of rubbish nobody wanted to read. Biographies and travel books and so on. Fat little fellow. And you know what? She’ — he pointed to the portrait — ‘fell for him. His name was Henri Beyle.’

I gave a start.

Mr Deschampsneufs lifted the palm of his hand, applauding my knowledge but asking to be allowed to go on. ‘When she came back to Isabella she had a stack of letters from Henri Beyle. Of course nothing had happened. The trouble with that fellow Beyle was that he was better at talking love than making it. One day, I think it was in 1831, nothing like Abolition or anything like that yet, she got a book from Paris. It was called Le Rouge et le Noir. On the fly-leaf Beyle had written the number of a page. She turned to this page and saw that two short paragraphs had been marked. When she read the paragraphs she tore up all Henri Beyle’s letters and destroyed the book.’

We had studied Le Rouge et le Noir in the sixth form. I hadn’t liked it. The language seemed to me crude, and I thought the story was simple and unreal, more like a fairytale than a story about real people. I said this to Mr Deschampsneufs.

‘Well, it must seem like that to us out here. We don’t have people like marquises and so on here or anything like their society. And we can’t see the point of a man like Julien or the Marquis de la Mole. But still, they tell me it’s a great book.’

‘I know. I had to write essays about it. What were the paragraphs Stendhal marked?’

‘The paragraphs. You know the story well? You remember when Julien climbs into Mlle de la Mole’s room at night?’ He went to the bookcase and took out a book. It opened easily at the place he required. ‘Julien has just thrown the ladder and the rope down on the flowerbeds. You remember?’

‘That was the sort of fairytale thing I couldn’t appreciate.’

‘Yes, yes.’ He began to read from the book: ‘Et comment moi m’en aller? dit Julien d’un ton plaisant, et en affectant le langage créole.’ Mr Deschampsneufs’s accent was suitably broad. ‘Suddenly, you see, that fellow Beyle throws in a reference to creole French. For no reason at all. It’s a big moment in his story, and he goes and does a thing like that. And then he puts in, in brackets, mark you: Une des femmes de la maison était née à Saint-Domingue. — Vous, vous en aller par la porte, dit Mathilde, ravie de cette idée. For no reason at all. That bit of dialogue in creole French. Just for a private joke. And the joke was that he had exchanged those very words in the house of Clémentine Curial with that woman whose picture you see there.’

I was deeply impressed. I felt that Mr Deschampsneufs’s story had brought the past close. It was possible to believe in the link between our island and the great world. My own dreams were rendered absurd. The outside world was stripped of its quality of legend and reduced to the comprehensible. Grand figures came near. A writer accounted great had been turned into a simple man, fat and middle-aged and ironic. And nearness exalted; it did not diminish.

‘A whole life. And that is all that remains. A little aside in a novel, a sentence in brackets. A little affectionate, a little mocking. Femme de la maison. Not true, not nice. What do you think? I don’t know about you, but I feel it’s more than I’m going to leave behind. This immortality is a funny thing. You can never tell who is going to get it. How many people who read that book would stop and think about what I’ve just told you, you think? She tore up all the letters. Do you think she was right to feel insulted?’

Another familiar topic, clearly. And, as with the first, I took no part. Shortly afterwards I left. Champ walked part of the way with me. I asked him whether it was true about his ancestor and Stendhal. He said, ‘My father would kill himself if it wasn’t true. I believe Le Rouge is the only novel he’s read.’

It was the end of another of our Isabella days, the sun gone, the wind cool, the sky ablaze in the west with red-tinted clouds, and against this swiftly passing splendour the tall palmistes and branching saman were black, but with a suggestion of deeper, warmer tints. With Stendhal and the ancestor and the creole language of Santo Domingo in my head, I saw the scene as though I had already been removed from it and it was occurring in memory, in a book.

‘The painting of the lady, is that old?’

‘Don’t try to be too polite with me. It was done by a man in Florida or Minnesota or some such place. He paints from photographs and my father sent him a sketch of some sort. There is another one, if you want to know, in my parents’ bedroom. I made them put it there. Done on a dish, and glazed.’

I was carrying away more than a story of Stendhal and the lady. I was carrying away a memory of the absurdity with which the meeting had ended. Did old Deschampsneufs genuinely not see when I attempted to shake hands? I attempted twice, and when he did give me his hand it was only two fingers. The pointlessness of the insult had taken me by surprise. It was as if an unknown, unnoticed man whom I was passing on the pavement had suddenly attacked me and walked on. So private! So much a thing to keep! And walking back through this horribly man-made landscape of which Browne had spoken, I thought, above Champ’s talk: You do not care for what they stand or what they are and they have nothing to offer you. You are about to leave, you have left: the mother saw that. Why, recognizing the enemy, did you not kill him swiftly?

We underestimate or overestimate our strength always. We refuse to wound and thereby throw away our hand. We create problems for the future. Le Rouge. Our attention in class had been drawn to Stendhal’s cleverness in making Julien, right at the beginning of the book, mistake water on a church floor for blood. This had seemed to me crude. But now, full of the closeness of Stendhal, I looked at the red sky and saw blood. And yet was glad I was leaving. Do not dismiss melodrama and style: they are human needs. How easy it is to turn that landscape, which we make ordinary by living in it and becoming part of it, into the landscape of the battlefield.

One journey had to be made before I left. It was to my father. Some months after the end of the war he had been released. For a few days the newspapers were interested. So too were some of our new-style politicians the Royal Commission had brought into being, businessmen and contractors who saw in politics a potentially rewarding extension of their private affairs. These men thought my father’s approval was still important. But my father had not responded and they had gone away. My father did not go back to his camp in the eastern hills. He selected a wooded site in the southwest, near the sea. This was also on crown lands. But the government, I was glad to see, did not molest him.

I went with money in my pocket. I had a debt to repay. His camp was in a clearing off a track. It was an ugly clearing, a disfiguring of the woods. He, or the disciples he still had with him, had turned the ground between the tree stumps into mud; and on the mud they had laid passageways of planks and coconut trunks. The land was not cleared all the way down to the sea. A thin screen of woods hid the sea, as though that was a tainted view. At one end of the clearing was his hut, with mud walls and a thatch of carat palms. On a tree stump on a mound was what looked like a toy replica of this hut. The mound had been scraped clean of weeds and grass and had been plastered. The toy hut was obviously a shrine of some sort. Such childishness was not what I had expected from Gurudeva. Better the leader of the mob than this wasted, scruffily bearded man in a yellow robe who now, ignoring me, went to his shrine and rearranged his little bits and pieces, his stones and shells and leaves and roots and his coconut. The coconut seemed especially important. He had invented so much. His inventions had been so brilliant. Had the gift now been withdrawn?

I went to the larger hut. A woman dressed in white greeted me. She recognized me and I knew who she was. The embarrassment was mine alone. I said, ‘I am leaving the island for good. I have come to see him before I go.’ She spoke to me in Hindi: ‘Have you come then for a sight of him?’ She used a word with strong religious associations: darshan. I did not wish to lie. I said nothing, surrendering, as I had surrendered at the Deschampsneufs’, to the woman’s idea of herself, her concept of the holiness of her charge and the holiness of the ground. She was beyond the reproach of sex: this was the reproach I had feared to sense. She said: ‘It is his day of silence. He has given up the world. He has become a true sanyasi.’

Sanyasi, yellow-robed, among woods! Woods hymned endlessly in Aryan chants and found here on an island surrounded by a brown-green sea. It was his day of silence. When he came back to the hut from his shrine he greeted me without recognition at first. But then he put his arms around me. I remembered the embrace of his arms before, the day he towed me on the crossbar of his bicycle. He was gentle and silent. He went to the inner room of the hut. The sympathy that remained was for the idea of him. Gurudeva, asvamedha: these were the inspired moments, the fulfilment in a few weeks of a promise that had festered long.

But I had also come to repay a debt. It couldn’t really be repaid, but the gesture was necessary. I said to the woman, ‘I would like to leave this for Gurudeva.’ I gave her a prepared wad of a hundred dollars. Then I gave her three ten-dollar bills. ‘My father borrowed this from your son Dalip.’ Clad in white, the colour of purity, she took the money, showing no surprise.

Afterwards I went for a walk on the beach. The coast here was wild and untidy. The water at times frothed yellow with mud. The beach was littered with driftwood and other debris from the mighty South American rivers which, in flood, pushed their discolouring fresh waters as far north as this. The sand was black and pebbly and sharp. Another cloudy day, the clouds as dirty and ragged as the sea and the beach. I walked. The woods of crown lands gave way to the mangy coconut grove of a rundown estate. The trunks of the trees had orange blotches; beyond them were the white wooden houses of the labourers, white distemper streaked with the running salt rust of old tin roofs. There was a car on the beach. And in a little huddle in the shallows, as though in the vastness of sky and sea and sand they had come together for protection, was a white family, made up it seemed only of women and girls. A man, clearly of the party, was standing on the beach. A man burdened by women. We walked towards one another.

He said, as one sharing a joke, ‘You went to Gurudeva’s camp?’

‘I’ve just been to see him. I am his son.’

‘Oh! Deschampsneufs told me you went to see him.’

‘His son asked me to tea.’

He was not more than forty, but he had the used-up look of a man who had found his niche early and could already look back to a stupendous twenty years’ experience.

‘How did you like old Des?’ he asked.

‘He was all right.’

‘He told you about his ancestress?’

‘I heard about her.’

‘Poor Deschampsneufs.’

‘I don’t see how anybody can call Deschampsneufs poor.’

‘It’s pathetic, really. He’s got this French thing.’

‘I know.’

‘But of course, as you know, the Niger is a tributary of that Seine.’

The phrase came out whole: it had been used before. I felt choked. I wanted fresh air. I wished to be among people of greater fears.

‘Des told me you were going abroad to further your studies.’ He used the newspaper words. His thin hair fell crinkly and wet over his sallow forehead, above eyes hollow from glasses. ‘You know, it’s an odd thing. But I’ve never been abroad. All my friends they go abroad and come back and say what a wonderful time they had. But I note they all come back. I tell you, boy, this place is a paradise.’ That word again. ‘I suppose you going to do like all the others and come back with a whitey-pokey.’ Again that word.

He lifted his hand to his forehead to push back the loose hair. I studied his veins. They were like the map of a river. Whitey-pokey: I had learned to read that word. The Niger was a tributary of that Seine, in paradise. Fresh air! Escape! To bigger fears, to bigger men, to bigger lands, to continents with mountains five miles high and rivers so wide you couldn’t see the other bank, to journeys that took two days and a night. Goodbye to this encircling, tainted sea!

My friends from Isabella Imperial planned a dinner for me. I was overwhelmed by the gesture. It was sweet to find that after all the fumbling with relationships I had friends who wished to mark my going. Too sweet; too disturbing. When Hok came to take me in his car to the restaurant I made some excuse. I couldn’t explain why at the last minute I no longer wanted to go. It was an impulse of childishness, no doubt: a fear of the big occasion, a fear of warmth and friendship, a poisoning feeling of inadequacy and the wish to be alone with that sudden, nameless hurt. I don’t know. I was ashamed and regretful a moment after he had left, taking my excuse to the others. The next morning he brought the book they were going to give me. It carried all their stylish, evolving signatures. Fête Champêtre: The Paintings of Watteau and Fragonard. I felt that the choice of book had been left to Deschampsneufs.

It was only on the ship, well on my way, that I came upon a narrow strip of paper between the pages. It carried an unsigned typewritten message: Some day we shall meet, and some day.… I suspected Hok, because of the typing and because the paper was of the sort used for copy in newspaper offices. It was like that last family lunch my father had arranged. There is something after all in the staged occasion, the formal sentiment. It came to me on the ocean, this message ending in dots, telling me that all my notions of shipwreck were false, telling me this against my will, telling me I had created my past, that patterns of happiness or unhappiness had already been more or less decided.

I thought of Columbus as hour after hour, day after day — with no pause at night, as I had been half-expecting — we moved through that immense ocean. The wind whipped the crests of the waves into rainbow-shot spray. The sunlight grew paler and faded; the rainbows disappeared. I thought of that world which, as I was steadily separated from it, became less and less discovered, less and less real. No more foolish fears: I was never to return.

And witness me then, just four months later, standing in the attic of a boarding-house called a private hotel in the Kensington High Street area, holding a photograph of a girl and praying for a little bit of immortality, a prophylactic against the greater disorder, the greater shipwreck that had come to me already.

7

I WISHED then to go back as whole as I had come. But though a fresh start is seldom possible and the world continues our private fabrication, departure is departure. It fractures; the bone has to be set anew each time. I was in London, awaiting health, Sandra my luck, when I heard that my father was dead. The news came in a guarded letter from my sister. I went to the British Council reading room, to which I had been long a stranger, to look at our local newspapers. What was not even a paragraph in a London paper had made headlines in the Inquirer, with photographs of the camp I had seen once, now unfamiliar and oddly exposed with officials and policemen standing about. My father had been shot dead, and a woman with him. The weapon was a Luger. The news required a response. It required sentiment and the opposite of sentiment. I walked about the streets. Later I went with a prostitute. I was full of my news. But I saved it for the end. Her shallow whorish reaction, of sentiment and reproof, was all I could have asked for. Later, in the blankness of night, I cried on Sandra’s breasts. And suddenly I discovered I was ready to leave. We left from Avon-mouth. It was August but the wind was chill. Gulls bobbed like cork amid the harbour litter. We headed south and sailed for thirteen days.