“My house.”
“It’s been bad enough getting down here. I’m going to have something cold to drink.”
He walked back with her to where he had been sitting, at the far end of the lobby. The position was open: the lobby in front, and on one side a wide passage like an internal veranda, beside a patio where, within a concrete border, a little forest garden had been created: lit up now by the sun which was directly overhead, a garden of thick green vines and creepers with large heart-shaped leaves that grew in the shade of the deep forest, the lower leaves browned in the drought, the black earth dry.
He sat in his chair against the wall and pressed for the waiter. She sat in the chair that was half in the veranda; her posture was easy. She put her bag down on the floor, and he noted that: the woman with time, awaiting developments.
He said, “In public places these days I always prefer to sit with my back against a wall. It’s a simple precaution. Remain observable in public places. Never sit with your back to a door.”
She lit a cigarette with a lighter, a blue cylinder; and he noticed, with slight disgust, how her bruised top lip came down over her teeth and then fitted tightly over them. Her eyes were beginning to grow moist; she was no longer as casual and cool as when she had arrived.
He hitched up his trousers, feeling the neatness of his own gestures and the neatness of his own clothes. He passed the thumb and middle finger of his right hand over his mustache.
He said, “That’s a nice lighter.”
“It’s French. You throw them away when you’re finished with them. Sahara gas, I suppose.”
She passed it to him. But her eyes were beginning to cloud with irritation. When the waiter came she ordered a rum punch. And she smoked her cigarette, looking at the forest garden.
He stood the lighter upright on the table.
He said, “You would find this hard to believe, but when I was a boy my big ambition was to be a waiter in this hotel. They didn’t allow black people.”
“It’s a pretty tatty place.”
“We get things when we don’t want them. The world is for the people who already have it. For the people who don’t take chances.”
The rum punch came.
“Like the duplicator you saw at Thrushcross Grange. We get things last hand and they expect us to be grateful.”
She appeared to revive after sipping at the rum punch.
She said, “How did it go with the executives?”
He didn’t understand. Then his mind raced, and he felt betrayed. As in a dream he saw confused swift events: a drive to his house, her reading of his writings, exposure. He didn’t know what to do with his eyes. Then he remembered their conversation on the telephone.
He said, “The Lions?”
“Peter is a Lion. Was he there?”
“Massa wasn’t there. These business people, they’re all on your side now. But I’m not giving anybody any certificate of good conduct. I’m not giving massa a certificate. That’s what Sablich’s want and that’s what they’re not going to get.”
“Nobody likes Sablich’s here.”
“I hate them. Do you know how the Sablich fortune was made? Sablich was an immigrant from Prussia or somewhere in Germany. He came over in 1803. He went to Trinidad. They were giving away land there. The more blacks you brought in the more land you got. Free. In 1807 the slave trade was abolished. It was like immigration controls in England: everybody rushed to beat the ban. Sablich ordered a boatload of Negroes from a Liverpool firm. Nobody knows how many. Two or three hundred, at a hundred pounds a head. They got here just in time. And then Sablich refused to pay. When the fuss died down Sablich was a very rich man. And then he left Trinidad and came over here. That was the start of that very, very respectable firm.”
Jane’s irritation had returned. Her eyes were moist; to Jimmy it seemed that she was either about to cry or to lose her temper.
She said, “I don’t know why everybody feels obliged to tell me that story. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard about the origin of the Sablich fortune.”
“Massa’s firm.”
“But not mine.”
Jimmy said, “Look. I don’t want us to be friends.”
And she was instantly alert, on the defensive.
He noted that. He said, “In England I had too many women friends.”
She understood his meaning. He studied her eyes alone.
He didn’t give her time to say anything. He jerked his chin toward the park. “When we were at school we used to come to play there some afternoons. Cricket and football. The white people would watch us. And we would act up for them. When I was in England I met a girl who had been here as a girl. She passed through with her parents and they stayed at the Prince Albert. All she remembered of the place were the little black boys playing football in the park outside the hotel. We worked out the dates. And I realized she must have seen me. That I must have been one of the black boys. What do you make of that?”
“Was she one of the women with whom you were not friends?”
The woman courted, ready to be courted.
He said, and he spoke solemnly, “I was nervous about seeing you this afternoon. I don’t notice hair. I don’t notice clothes. What I felt about you I felt as soon as I saw your eyes. They looked as they look now. Half screaming.”
She was unwilling to let the topic pass. She said, “Why were you nervous?”
“I thought my imagination might have been playing tricks.”
“Was it?”
He didn’t reply. He pressed for the waiter. “Bryant is waiting for us. He wants to give you back your dollar. The car will bring you back.”
She would object. But he knew now that she was going to come.
THE DOORMAN stopped leaning against the iron pillar of the portico and blew on his whistle. Across the road, the driver, sitting on a park bench with other drivers in the half-shade of a big tree, stood up, short and very fat, and shook out the seat of his trousers. The big American car turned wide in the road and entered the semicircular hotel drive.
Through the haze of heat and rum punch Jane noted the size of the car. It was absurd, pathetic; she could have giggled. The doorman opened the door; Jimmy tipped him. It was pathetic and absurd. The car seat was hot; the sun burned her arms. They turned toward the city center, away from the dustiness and glare of the park and the view of the red-scarred hills, into a deader heat; the wind that came through the windows was warm. Black asphalt streets, still residential-looking; white or yellow-white buildings; shadows contracted and black. Beyond the blue-tinted windscreen, a pale sky.
The car was so wide they sat at far ends of the seat. Jimmy sat erect and formal, his left foot on his right knee, his narrow trousers riding up above his thin nylon sock, his right hand resting on his exposed lower calf. Jane sat directly behind the driver. The driver’s bright blue shirt, of a shiny synthetic material, showed the black skin below and a white reticulated vest; on his neck, half hidden by his shirt collar, was a thick roll of black flesh with scattered springs of hair; a blue light, from the tinted windscreen, fell on his bare fat arms.
Jimmy said, “The Tennis Club.”
She didn’t turn to look. She was aware only of buildings close to the road: no openness there, no sign of courts. But the area was like that: new buildings standing in the grounds of old, open spaces everywhere filled in.
Jimmy said, “That girl I was telling you about, her father was in Intelligence. When he came here he went to the Tennis Club one day. I think it was the championships or something. Of course, no blacks allowed. He got mad when he saw the local whites behaving as though there wasn’t a war on. He felt that the Vichy people in Martinque could seize the island at any time. He asked one of the players — the boy was sitting next to him, very cool and don’t-care-a-damn — whether he didn’t think he should be fighting for the mother country. The boy said, ‘I prefer playing tennis.’ ”