The sky brightened; the white mist above the swamp thinned. Soon the coolness of the day would go, the fires would start all over the great plain, and from the height of the Ridge it would look as though here and there, through minute punctures, the land was leaking smoke. Far away, the airport was just visible. The airplanes, their shapes not distinct, were little gleams of white.
Mrs. Grandlieu used to say, “Sometimes I does just look at the airport and think it damn far, you know.” She said it only to unsettle; but it was easy to imagine the Ridge cut off and under siege. Already, something like a state of siege existed every night. There were police roadblocks on all the main hillside roads, so that a dinner party or cocktail party or a visit to Harry’s bar had an added adventure, and gave point to the hysteria of the people who lived on the Ridge, people who felt threatened by what lay below, and moved higher and higher up the hills until, like the people who had held the house before Jane and Roche, they could move no higher and had flown.
Within the house very little remained to mark the passage of these people. The ocher-washed concrete walls were virgin; no nail had been driven into them, no picture had been hung. A few scratches and black scuff marks on the baseboard in the empty back room hinted at games, a child or children; but that was all.
There were more reminders of the previous people outside. In the half-rockery half-flowerbed against the stepped concrete wall at the front they had planted roses; and on the spindly yellow stalks of those that survived little single-petaled blooms still occasionally came, opening and wilting in one day. The shrubs they had planted had remained static in the clay and had dried down. The only things that really grew at the front were young trees that had seeded themselves: a flame of the forest between the rocks of the rockery, three or four pink poui in a crack in the concrete at the edge of the gateway, a thorn bush with hundreds of little yellow flowers on spiky black branches.
At the back of the house concrete steps went a little way down the eroded hillside to where there was a retaining wall of concrete blocks. The cypresses planted beside the steps were stunted, and against the retaining wall were choked growths of Bermuda grass where, during the rains of another season, grass seed from the front lawn and the area around the back porch had washed down. Beyond the wall the land flattened, the soil was better, and there was the remnant of a vegetable garden, with banana trees. Neither Jane nor Roche had touched the vegetable garden. This lower part of the garden, beyond the steps and the retaining wall, Jane seldom walked in; it was some weeks after she had arrived that she had discovered, at the end of the garden, at the edge of the gully, a row of Honduras pine seedlings.
The most substantial thing the previous people had left was a children’s house or hut on this flatter part of the land. It showed the local carpenter’s hand: it was less a miniature than a replica of many shacks in the city. It stood flat to the ground on a timber frame, with one room and a pitched roof; the walls were multicolored, with old boards from other buildings; and it had been fitted with an old paneled door. It looked whole, but it had begun to rot. There was a great gritty black ants’ nest below the eaves. Jane had imagined this to be alive with ants; but she saw this morning that the nest had cracked and broken away in parts and was dry and empty.
The door was slightly ajar. Jane pushed at it. It yielded. Then there was some resistance. A length of coarse, shredded string brushed across her hand like an insect; and as she started, slapping at the affected hand, she saw that the hut was tenanted.
Within, in the darkness, striped with the light that came through the gaps in the boards, in a smell of stale smoke, dirt, old clothes and something like the smell of dead small animals, a wild man of the hills was asleep. His matted hair was done in long pigtails, reddish brown in places and with a kind of thick blue grease; his face was broad, very black and shiny where the light caught it. He was in rags; and he lay amid other rags.
He stirred at the sound of her slapping hand, and gave a grunt. She saw a cutlass beside his bundle and his old paint can, and she turned and walked very fast to the concrete steps, leaving the hut door open. She began to run up the steps, past the Bermuda grass clumps, the stunted cypresses, not looking back. How long had he been there? For how long had that hut in the garden been his home? At the top of the steps, near the hibiscus bush, she stopped and looked back. There was nothing to see.
She thought of Bryant in the hut at Thrushcross Grange, with his aggressive pigtails. He, like the man asleep in the children’s hut, had issued out of the city and the plain below, which from this height could be seen all at a glance. Down there, in the garden, the scale had altered; it was like being taken, for a moment, into the intricate life contained in that view.
The sun was out; it caught her on the temples. The woodland and the children’s hut cast shadows. The haze on the plain was going. Once the hills were green and had only been part of the view, a foreground spattered with the red and orange of the flame of the forest.
She thought of Bryant. She thought of Jimmy Ahmed. Succubus. In the house, through the half-open door of his room, she saw Roche asleep. She changed her mind and didn’t awaken him. She went back down the passage to the large sitting room, with a view through the picture window of the front lawn in shadow. From the paperbacks on the nearly empty fitted shelves she took down the Academy English Dictionary. She found the page she wanted. She read: Succubus: demon that mates with a sleeping man.
He called from his room: “Jane.”
When she went to him he said, “I’ve just had a terrible dream. Just after you came in from the garden. I was about to be tortured. There was a doctor in a dark suit. He said, ‘We’ll get the coitus out of you.’ And I knew I didn’t want him to use those things in his box on me. And that the coitus I had to get rid of I could get rid of just by going to the lavatory.”
He had never spoken of a dream like this before, and she was disturbed. He had begun with real distress, but his distress seemed to go as he spoke, and at the end he was even smiling. She didn’t know what to do; and the moment for sympathy and response passed.
She said, “We dream all kinds of strange things just before we wake up.”
A car or van had stopped outside the house. It turned in the road, and then it could be heard going away banging down the hill.
She said, “The paper’s come. I’ll go and get it.”
A radio came on in the far end of the house. It was Adela, the maid, in her room, listening to the morning program of hymns sponsored by a church of the American South that specialized in Negro souls.
Adela was young but devout. She was plump and healthy, but she went to all the faith healing meetings that itinerant Southern American preachers held in the city. It had at first amused Jane to hear of these meetings, to hear Adela’s stories of crippled Negroes who had thrown away crutches and ripped off bandages and run up shouting to the platform, of bewitched boys whose bodies had been made to give up nails and other pieces of metal that had somehow, during their bewitchment, been absorbed into their flesh. But Jane had soon regretted the encouragement she had given Adela; for Adela, when she understood that Jane and Roche were not married and were living “in sin,” became permanently annoyed. In her white uniform, on which she insisted, she walked through the large house like a Friday night woman preacher, filling the rooms with her annoyance, and looking for fresh signs of sin.
Jane, going out to the front gate to get the newspaper, heard Adela shriek. And she knew the cause: the lager bottles on the metal table in the back porch.