Jane was only half listening, sitting at the far end of the seat, withdrawn, in a haze of rum punch and heat which was like a sense of the adventure she had committed herself to. Half amused at the reference to that girl, unnamed, whose father had been in Intelligence, knowing it to be something laid out to catch her attention, she yet allowed herself to wonder about the girl; she yet allowed herself to play with the images he had set floating in her mind.
She had driven through the city many times and had long ago ceased to see it. Now, in the excitement that amounted to stupor, the feeling of a dissolving world, she found herself catching at details: the top galleries of old-fashioned Spanish-style buildings overhanging pavements where ragged beggars sat vacant, beside old women selling muddy-looking cakes and colored sweets and sweepstakes pinned to boards. In this sense of being transported out of herself, transported out of a stable world into something momentarily unstable, lay the adventure. She had been half prepared for it. What she hadn’t been prepared for, what gave her little twinges of alarm, was this feeling of a sudden descent into the city itself, until then unknown, unexplored. And yet, with another part of herself, she continued to be amused by the absurd motorcar and her position in it, by the glances that the car and she in it and Jimmy with her were getting. Such a misunderstanding; so absurd.
Jimmy was saying, “Now, they’ve all gone. Canada, England, America. Australia. They’ve all gone.”
The tennis players. So strange, this elegy for them, in the heat. He spoke, she noted, as from a great distance. As though he had been left behind.
They came to the main square, once an area of trees and asphalted walks, now full of parked motorcars and rough wooden booths. The reggae shrieked from a dozen amplifiers, now above the roar of motorcars and trucks, now below it. Diseased pariah dogs wandered about; some lay prostrate on the crowded pavements; and she studied one, dead-eyed, with a growth like raw flesh protruding out of its mangy yellow fur. The sea, when they came to it, gave no feeling of air and lightness: the fine red powder of bauxite, sheds of corroded corrugated iron, the reek of the burning rubbish dump, everything here — hillside, forest, sea, mangrove — turned to slum.
Excitement grew on her, studying these things as though she had never seen them before, taking them in detail by detail. And now, as they began to race along the highway, past the shacks on the hillside and the long red avenues of the redevelopment project, every little house casting an identical angled shadow, as they raced, the hot air and the noise of the car, the sense of speed, were like the things she was surrendering to: the little delirium, of which she thought she remained in perfect control, knowing that it would soon be over, that the world would become solid again, and her own vision clear.
Jimmy spoke occasionally, making little comments on what they passed. His words were indistinct and she didn’t concentrate on what he said. The little delirium became the adventure; this was what she wanted to stay close to and be contained within, this dizzying mood, of which, curiously, his presence formed no part: the exaltation produced by the heat, the drive that was coming to climax, and that vision of decay piled on decay, putrefaction on putrefaction.
She fixed her gaze on the driver’s neck, on the black roll of almost hairless flesh within the collar of the transparent shiny blue shirt, and on the subsidiary roll above, lost in little kinky springs of hair, as black as the skin.
“Where did those come from?”
Jimmy was speaking to her directly. They were now well out of the city, in the factory area, driving beside the charred verges and the sunken fields in which lay the wrecks of motor vehicles.
She fingered the silver necklaces he was pointing to. “Morocco.” She was going to say: Someone gave them to me. But she didn’t say that. She said, “They cost about sixpence. They were given me by a lover.”
He was still sitting erect at the end of the seat, formal and buttoned up, embarrassed by the drive and her silence, and giving little licks at his lips. As buttoned up as he had been when he had first presented himself to her at Thrushcross Grange, but now distinctly absurd.
She added, “He didn’t believe in gifts of great value. He didn’t want money to come between us.”
He caught her tone. He said, “Something for the girl who has everything.”
Yet when they turned off the highway into the abandoned industrial park, and there was only bush and foundations of buildings among bush, her excitement began to quicken into something like uncertainty. And when the car stopped in Jimmy’s yard, and there was only silence in the heat, with the bush bounding every view, and she noticed the short squat driver with his powerful fleshy arms, she began to feel dismay.
Excitement was dying; she could exercise clear judgment again. The house was as she had remembered it: the horrible blue carpet with the meaningless black and yellow splashes, the books on the shelves, the photographs, including that one with the girl or woman — with the father in Intelligence? — torn out. It had happened so often to her, who had known so many men, who had found so many men to be candidates: this altering of the character of a room or a house which, at first seen and judged in a detached way, then all at once became another kind of room, full of a man’s intimate attributes. And this room now repelled her; and from her new lucidity she tried, swiftly, seeking to reestablish her balance, to re-create the chain of happenings that had brought her here, that had so altered the nature of the day for her.
Jimmy said, “Your eyes look half screaming.”
She turned to him almost with irritation, her eyes moist, as if with tears.
He put his hands on her shoulders, and he was astonished at her response. She fixed her mouth on his, her lips opened wide. He was taken by surprise and couldn’t react immediately; and as her tobacco-tasting tongue and her lips — that healed wound — did what they thought they had to do (no secrets here, and words no longer helped, no bravado about lovers who brought gifts from Morocco), as the action of her mouth became insipid to him and then meaningless, he thought, first of all, and without surprise: But she is starved. And then: But she is like a girl, she knows nothing, she is looking for everything in the kiss, she believes she has to be violent to show that she knows.
Her blouse was wet below the arms; he had not noticed that before. Her breasts were pressed against him, so that he was hardly aware of them as breasts, only as flesh. She had given him so little time. He would have liked, as it were, to witness the moment, but now he felt he was losing it. He edged his mouth away from hers at last and, holding her tight against him, drew breath. He felt that the moment had gone and was irrecoverable.
He said, with odd formality, still holding her, “Shall we go into the next room?”
She said quickly, in a whisper that held nothing of intimacy, “Don’t ask stupid questions.” And immediately she disengaged herself from him.
Coolly, with that slightly dragging step he had noticed as she had walked across the lobby of the Prince Albert, and still with her shoulder bag, she went into the bedroom, ahead of Jimmy, as though she knew the way. A maroon carpet with a large bright flowered pattern, a yellow candlewick bedspread on a double bed, bedside tables with imitation-wood graining, a lamp, a dressing table, a telephone on a chest of drawers: it was like a bedroom display in the window of an English furniture shop, and it looked as artificial. The carpet lay loose on the terrazzo floor, the ocher-washed concrete walls were bare, and the light in the room was hard and even. The open windows gave a sense of stillness and heat: a hot pale-blue sky, limp bush, not even the tops of the spiky palms moving.